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Perl Programming Handhelds Hardware

Nokia to Port Perl to Mobiles 258

Posted by CowboyNeal from the not-just-for-dialing-scripts dept.
jonknee writes "MobileTracker notes that Nokia has made it clear that the Perl scripting language is coming to its popular Series 60 devices. This will be a huge boon to mobile software. Just look what happened to the web when CGI got popular. A time frame was not announced."
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Nokia to Port Perl to Mobiles More

Nokia to Port Perl to Mobiles

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  • Pure nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:42AM (#8007300)

    This will be a huge boon to mobile software.

    What? Please elaborate how perl can help in front-end applications for mobile phones.

    • Re:Pure nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)

      by lukew ( 528994 )
      Are you kidding?

      I wont go into a flame/troll, but perl is not liked from some lower levels, and some high levels.

      To assume that it will not do anything for -any- platform is just nonsense. It's proved it's worth anywhere where it matters, why wont it here?
    • Lower licensing costs than J2ME?

    • Re:Pure nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:02AM (#8007414) Homepage Journal
      it will on depend on what they will make available on it, some extensions to create dialogs and stuff would make creating simple software for it easier, a lot easier to start doing simple software for it at least.

      j2me can't access the filesystem and stuff like that directly, so that limits a lot what you can do with j2me java.

      and symbian c++ isn't that straightforward to pick up and the sdk isn't that hot either(grr.. i wish i had some GOOD book on it, learning it as i go at the moment), even though that's the way to do powerful applications and seems to have some logic once you 'get in it'. j2me on the other hand was very easy to pick up.

      so it would be very nice to have some light(to write) scripting language that could access the whole hardware(for doing apps that do periodical file uploads, analyze some files or whatever).

      • Re:Pure nonsense (Score:2, Informative)

        by godIsaDJ ( 644331 )
        What about OPL [symbiandiaries.com]?
        It's open source (something we all like), BASIC-like but to me almost a scripting language. Extensible and *very* powerful!

        However, Perl will be welcome, actually *any* language should be welcome.
        Why do you think there should be less development solutions for Symbian OS that say Linux?

      • you don't have to chosse J2ME or C++ to program an app in a series 60. Java bindings are available and can be full series 60 software. (see http://www.symbian.com/technology/standard-java.ht ml)

        I think porting perl here will not add a lot to what's available.

        • Re:Pure nonsense (Score:3, Informative)

          by gl4ss ( 559668 )
          it is? well that url you pointed to didn't actually say so. series60 does not have 'personal java' like p800 or communicators do.

          if i'm wrong, prove it with one app that does it and preferebly a sdk too.

          "The Nokia 7650 smartphone, released in Q3 2002, is a member of the Nokia Series 60 UI family. This model runs Symbian OS v6.1 customised to the Series 60 look and feel and supports Java MIDP 1.0. In addition, Nokia provide a couple of proprietary extension APIs (in the com.nokia.mid.sound and com.nokia.mi
      • j2me can't access the filesystem and stuff like that directly, so that limits a lot what you can do with j2me java. [...] so it would be very nice to have some light(to write) scripting language that could access the whole hardware(for doing apps that do periodical file uploads, analyze some files or whatever).

        This surely can't be the point of porting perl. The J2ME/MIDP1.0 implementation (of the 3650, anyway) is already "enhanced" (it does stuff that isn't in the MIDP specs - the whole com.nokia.* packag

        • Re:Pure nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)

          by gl4ss ( 559668 )
          a lot of midp's being limited is so that you can trust it to not screw your phone completely up, like an applet(so you can now run any midlet without fearing too much. without *having* to trust anyone). if you gave it filesystem access you would lose that aspect. though people seem to trust .sis files found from god knows where..

          those extensions aren't that hot(when it comes to truly extending midp) and midp itself is lacking in when it comes to writing certain type of apps(like some app that would requir
    • agreed, I remember being a bit excited when I got my new Nokia which has Java support and memory to store apps. most useless feature ever.
    • Their source code will fit on the small display.

    • Re:Pure nonsense (Score:2, Funny)

      by ghum ( 109642 )
      Really easy. On mobile phones, it is easy get a lot of line noise.

      That can directly be used as perl code.

    • I was sure this got posted to slashdot, but wasn't able to find a link to it. Anyway, here's Tim O'Reilly's "Wired News Wishes for 2004": http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4117

      At the end of the article, he quotes Rael Dornfest, author of Google Hacks and the mobilewhack, with that same exact plead.

  • Great (Score:4, Funny)

    by W32.Klez.A ( 656478 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:42AM (#8007301) Homepage
    In that case, how long until shitstorm.pl gets launched from a cellphone?

  • Next mobile (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Alioth ( 221270 )
    I was thinking of getting a Sony Ericcson phone, but if the Nokia will have a Perl port available, I might wait a bit longer before getting a replacement for my existing one :-)

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:48AM (#8007334)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Next mobile (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:59AM (#8007400) Journal
        Big question - does it have an SSH client? That would be a killer app for me, assuming latencies on GPRS are reasonable.

        It goes without saying that it's bound to have an IRC client :-)

        • Re:Next mobile (Score:5, Informative)

          by aallan ( 68633 ) <<alasdair> <at> <babilim.co.uk>> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:16AM (#8007481) Homepage

          Big question - does it have an SSH client?

          What? For the Nokia Series 60 platform? Yes!

          I SSH into my workplace UNIX box from my Nokia 3650 [nokia.com] moderately regularly. The SSH client for SymbainOS is a port of PuTTY and can be found here [sourceforge.net].

          Al.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:Next mobile (Score:2, Interesting)

          by ttj ( 580277 )
          An SSH client for a mobile phone would indeed be nice, but I personally wouldn't want to do massive amounts of administrative work on the so called keyboard of a mobile phone. Writing SMS messages is awkward enough already even though it has the predictive text feature on it. Think of what it would be like to enter line after line of cryptic *nix commands on it.

          I will, however, admit that it would be an easy way to brag about your uptime amidst your friends without the need to have physical access to the c
          • But the cryptic *nix commands are all short (that's why they are thought of as 'cryptic'). No, I wouldn't want to do massive amounts of admin on a mobile phone, but it might be useful if I get 'Oh my god I can't get to X' when I'm otherwise AFK, and want to do some basic troubleshooting.
        • The sidekick, hosted by tmobile in the US, has a downloadable terminal client, perfect for ssh, telnet, etc. and it downloads wirelesly. Even has a nice web browser, from which I am posting now.

      • Re:Next mobile (Score:2, Informative)

        by Fizzl ( 209397 )
        Well.. It doesn't work quite that way.
        Symbian creates a platform. It's not 'Nokia Symbian', it's just Symbian. The nokia S60 is another layer of itself so it's not automagically backported to Symbian. (UIQ is actually just a reference UI for Symbian 7. Nokia made it's own -- S60+S80+S90, SonyEricsson decided to use the UIQ)

        After that the customers (Nokia, SonyEricsson and so forth) throw out what they don't want, recode some parts which they want to interface their own way and code new ones.

        I strongly sus

  • cool new use for regexes... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BriSTO(V)L ( 668928 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:45AM (#8007314) Journal
    This is so great - instead of using the built-in PDA contact manager functions of our phones, us geeks will be able to craft perl scripts with regexes to look up people's phone numbers...

  • This is a great idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cervo ( 626632 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:46AM (#8007321) Journal
    the current choices (C++, Java) are overkill for a lot of applications

    They are right, for ripping info off of web pages and stuff you just can't compare C++ and Java to Perl because of the overhead, kudos. Now you can make perl scripts to provide real time quotes off of various websites very quickly, this is great news.
    • Are you on crack? That Nokia phone is slower than pig in slop retrieving "real time quotes". It's not going to matter if you're using Perl, C++, or Java....the bottleneck to doing it "quickly" is the network...not the programming language.
    • What overhead is there with Java?

      String name = request.getProperty("name");

      seems pretty a lightweight way to get stuff from a web request.

  • Pleasure (Score:5, Funny)

    by MisanthropicProggram ( 597526 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:48AM (#8007335)
    Just think...turn your ringing option to vibrate and then run the pleasure program. Insert phone in front pocket and enjoy!

  • When CGI got popular (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:49AM (#8007336)
    The web exploded - suddenly hundreds of thousands of dynamic sites, and sites with at least some dynamic content, sprang up in an amazingly short amount of time. The web was transformed from a purely flat, static medium to a dynamic one.

    But mobile phones aren't static. The more modern ones can already run applications written in C/C++ or Java. Simply adding support for perl merely increases the number of people who could write code for them. The difference is nowhere near as great as CGI vs custom web server was.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, by any means. I just don't see it having quite the same degree of impact as the poster.
    • Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, by any means. I just don't see it having quite the same degree of impact as the poster.

      Obviously, the slashdot editors are excited by now being able to run slashcode on their phones.
    • That's almost as big a transformation of the web as happened when suddenly animated gifs became popular. After they came to the masses, our eyeballs were transformed forever...
    • I agree that CGI made the web a lot more fun (anyone else remember URouLette from ukan.edu?) and gave people more reasons to start surfing, but you have to see the web explosion in a holistic view. Web browser techmology (<BLINK> tags notwithstanding) and the expansion of web aggregators such as yahoo made it much easier to use. That and the continual increases in modem speed with decreases in price allowed more people to acces the web.

  • Now I need an external keyboard (Score:5, Funny)

    by HrothgarReborn ( 740385 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:52AM (#8007348)
    It already takes me forever to enter names and phone numbers on a cell keypad. I am going to love finding how to do a % or a @.

  • Nokia needs to focus on fixing their issues first (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PierceLabs ( 549351 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:54AM (#8007368)
    Anyone who has done any development on Nokias phones knows that Nokia is very 'bullet point' when it comes to supporting them. Their Java support for MIDP2.0 for example is a complete joke. Its horribly broken and Nokia knows it - basic applications from tutorials sometimes don't work properly or don't work in certain firmware batches of phones. What they NEED to do is get some quality control in place instead of adding a 'language of the year' to their platforms.

  • Confused? (Score:5, Funny)

    by petesmart ( 317037 ) <petesmart@gmail.com> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:54AM (#8007369) Homepage
    How would I get the shebang line up using predictive text input?
    • clearly a joke - but I already have my nokia predictive text set up to shortcut various 'code like' phrases which I regularly have to send to collegues

      this works well - but confuses the hell out of my better half when she tries to send a message on my phone. obvious words often come out as strange collections of odd characters (to her)

      Just imagine how much BETTER it could be if perl was in the mix right there on the phone!

  • More information on the topic (Score:5, Informative)

    by storl ( 740323 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:54AM (#8007372)
    There is some more information here [theregister.co.uk] if anyone is interested.

  • JAPH SMS! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ravendeath ( 626771 )
    ... or how paying $2 per kilobyte (thank you, local carrier) makes those four words the most expensive data message ever sent, at an average of 50 lines of code to produce the later ones people came up with!

  • Python on Siemens (Score:5, Funny)

    by m_frankie_h ( 240122 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:03AM (#8007419)
    Now if only Siemens ported Python, that would be cool.
    • Python will be ported when the phones become more commonplace, common enough that the porting will be done by the open source community itself, not necessarily Nokia.

      I guess choosing Perl for porting is a form of popularity whoring - Perl is more popular that Python, let's port that, even when porting Python would be a more sensible move in technical sense (why would any sane person port such a monolithic awk-sed-workalike to a phone is beyond me). And also in the "open source community" sense; Perl seems

  • Good news, I suppose ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JamesOfTheDesert ( 188356 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:06AM (#8007435) Journal
    I mean, I's rather use Perl than Java for many tasks, but if Nokia wanted a good, clean interpreted language, why not Ruby, which has the power of Perl but a far cleaner design.
    • My god man, what are you doing? The flamewar that a comment like that could spark would have the potential to bring down all of slashdot!
      • My god man, what are you doing? The flamewar that a comment like that could spark would have the potential to bring down all of slashdot!

        Yeah, well, ...

        Two seconds after I posted I realized my comment might trigger a cascade of "Oh yeah, well what about #{my_favorite_language}? It has #{lang.features.join( ' and ' )}"

        Ruby isn't the only choice that would have been better than Perl; one of the strong factors typically in Perl's favor, the large number of available third-party libs, likely isn't useful h

    • "...but if Nokia wanted a good, clean interpreted language, why not Ruby, which has the power of Perl but a far cleaner design."

      Perl vs. Ruby flamewar in 3..2.....oh wait, nevermind.

  • cool... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Dreadlord ( 671979 )
    ...now I can host my own slash based site using my cell phone :)

  • Nokia perl (Score:5, Funny)

    by eap ( 91469 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:12AM (#8007469) Journal
    "We are unable to complete your call. Please hang up and try the -w option."

  • Wrong link (Score:4, Informative)

    by Accipiter ( 8228 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:14AM (#8007478)
    How about a link [theregister.co.uk] to the better, more informative article where the actual information lies?

  • Language Thrashing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:18AM (#8007491) Homepage Journal
    Nokia seems to be thrashing around for better language support. They started with the Symbian SDK, which uses Visual C++ as an IDE. Then there was Java, which traditionally has used Vi or EMACS as a sort of IDE. Then they seem to have decided that they needed better IDEs, so they made expensive deals with Borland's C++ and Java business units. (These BUs are part of one small company, but in a very real sense they're direct competitors.) Now they seem to think that a good scripting language is the missing link.

    I was at Borland when the C++ effort started scaling up, and there was a lot of enthusiasm among people who thought that there was going to be a huge demand for personal device apps. Obviously there's the same feeling at Nokia, only more so. I suspect that this market is not living up to expectation -- the only apps that generate any buzz are phonecams and games, and there's only so much market for those. Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.

    • Re:Language Thrashing (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tim C ( 15259 )
      Then there was Java, which traditionally has used Vi or EMACS as a sort of IDE.

      I do hope you're joking - I've been a Java programmer for 3.5 years now, and while I certainly *could* use vi (and some of my colleagues do), I wouldn't choose to do so.

      There are a great many proper IDEs available for developing Java, including Borland's JBuilder (which includes a free-as-in-beer version for personal use), netbeans (Free), eclipse (Free), AnyJ (free under Linux), etc.

      Sure, you can use your favourite text edit
      • I personally prefer a "real" IDE. But the last time I was involved with the Java world, there was a heavy prejudice against them. Then again, that was a few years ago, and I guess the landscape has changed. Certainly Java IDEs are a lot more solid now than they were in 1999.

    • Re:Language Thrashing (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Corvus9 ( 300802 )

      Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.

      I don't know if it's "the" problem, but it certainly is a large part of the problem.

      I had the misfortune to work on a USB sync application for a Symbian device, and the development tools are a throwback to the early 1970s. Writing a simple "Hello World" application for Symbian requires hundreds of lines of C++, MMC, IDL, and makefile text.

      You mention VC++ as the IDE

  • News (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:21AM (#8007513)
    Slashdot server will be moved to run on Nokia mobile phone. A slight lag might appear after the change.

  • How is java overkill? And how is this even big? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:36AM (#8007576) Homepage Journal
    CGI was the first easy way to program interactive web pages, as far as I know (it was a bit before my time), and perl was one of the languages you could use (along with C++, and pretty much anything else). But how does being able to write programs in perl on a device you can already code in C/C++ or java give you any huge advantage, unless you only know perl? I'm sure there are people who like to do all their coding in Perl, but unless you're one of them, this doesn't seem like much of a deal. Certanly nothing compared to CGI on the web. (And lets not forget that CGI was a pretty early tech, that came about when the web wasn't much. While CGI probably helped a lot, the web itself was pretty compelling, and growing quickly on it's own).

    Also, how exactly is java "overkill" for these devices? People talk about how a hello world app is 5 lines of code, but those few lines are constants that are going to be in any small app (i.e. public class Classname{ public static void main(String args[]){ ... simple code ...}}).

    If they're talking about running time, they're probably wrong too. Perl is interpreted, while java runs in a VM. I don't know if they use JIT on moble devices, but java will still be faster then Perl.

    So how is java 'overkill'? This is certainly good news for perl buffs, but I don't know why the rest of us should care.

    • CGI was the first easy way to program interactive web pages, as far as I know (it was a bit before my time), and perl was one of the languages you could use...

      While you can use Perl to write CGI, Perl doesn't really have anything to do with CGI coding. You talk alot about CGI, not Perl, I don't see your point? CGI is totally irrelevant to mobile phones...?

      Saying that Perl is used to write CGI scripts is like saying Java is used for writing web applets. Yes, you can write applets in Java, but most of the people I know don't.

      Al.

    • Re:How is java overkill? And how is this even big? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smcdow ( 114828 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @12:20PM (#8007851) Homepage
      Also, how exactly is java "overkill" for these devices?

      Call me old-fashioned, but I like simple things to be simple. I've written about this before, but it seems like java wonks can't write a hello world with out also generating a "HelloWorld" class, and about 500 classes (not lines of code, but classes to go along with it. I'm getting pretty pissed off about it.

      Not all problems require an OO solution. The majority of all problems don't require an OO solution. When you're doing something simple, the code should be simple as well. Why invent zillions of java classes and interfaces when 5 or 10 lines of perl code will do? IMO, this is the overkill that people speak of.

      And, as we all know, complicated things are just layered simple things, so perl does well for complicated things, too. Very well, in fact.

      Perl is interpreted,...

      This is a common mispercption about perl. Perl is what mainframers used to call a "compile and go" language (I used to do all my MNF programming as compile and go, but then I had unlimited machine time). Perl is compiled down to an optree, and the the optree is run by the perl runtime (which is essentailly a VM, but the perl folks don't like to call it that). This all happens transparently. An interpeted language is quite a different thing.

      ...java will still be faster then Perl

      I have my doubts. All the language performance comparisions I've read never take into account that perl programs are compiled just before they are run. I'd wager that if this was taken into account, then their performace would be fairly similar. (Of course, anyone can write inefficient programs in any language).

      • Perl is compiled down to an optree, and the the optree is run by the perl runtime (which is essentailly a VM, but the perl folks don't like to call it that). This all happens transparently. An interpeted language is quite a different thing.

        So just like Java, except for the compiling to bytecodes is done at runtime. I don't know how you concieve of interpreted languages, but even some of the old-style BASICs did something similar. Translating each line from text every time it's run isn't done in modern no

  • CGI? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mr_tommy ( 619972 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (mahargt)> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:48AM (#8007631) Journal
    Is this poster crazy?! To suggest that the sudden surge in web usage was down to CGI is frankly ludicrous! There is no way you can say, "right, that technology lead to the boom in the web". Its not possible! And even if you could pin it down to one thing, it would be something Many, many, many technologies have helped it along the way.

    Further, perl is not the only scripting language on the internet; furthermore i doubt it is the most popular. PHP, ASP, Java; all popular and equally efficient languages.
  • Wonder why it's easier to put a camel [perl.com] through a mobile phone than a snake [python.org].

  • This is good news (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ajs318 ( 655362 ) <sd_resp2@earthsh ... minus herbivore> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @12:21PM (#8007852)
    I'm going to stick my neck out and say I like Perl -- so I think this is good news. However, I've always thought of Perl as a text-processing language, and In My Limited Experience, mobile phones can only fit about ten words on the screen. {on the other hand, this could simply lead to phones with bigger screens.}

    There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.

    They're all right.

    Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.

    Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.

    And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?

    As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.

    Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!


    As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.

    • Re:This is good news (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tcopeland ( 32225 ) *
      > {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2
      > to equal 4, not 22

      Hm. In Ruby that'll raise an exception:

      irb(main):001:0> "2" + 2
      TypeError: cannot convert Fixnum into String
      from (irb):1:in `+'
      from (irb):1
      irb(main):002:0>

      But of course, you could do:

      irb(main):002:0> "2" + 2.to_s
      => "22"

      or

      irb(main):003:0> "2".to_i + 2
      => 4
      irb(main):004:0>

      to get whatever result you want.

    • Re:This is good news (Score:2, Interesting)

      by CatGrep ( 707480 )
      And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?

      Maybe not, but what if you do decide that you need it again 6 months later with some slight modifications you might not be able to figure out what your 'disposable' program was doing.

      is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *
  • All I want my cell todo is make calls. How will perl help me accomplish this goal?

    Tom
  • They're currently in the process of porting Quickbasic to MS enabled Phones.
  • Now there'll be 15 different ways to answer my phone?

    Relax...
    it's Funny...Ha..Ha..

  • Different times (Score:3, Informative)

    by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @04:53PM (#8009648)
    PERL is great, but the reason why it became extremely popular for the Internet was you had two choices to make a webpage dynamic back in the day: PERL and C/C++. PERL is an extremely power text parsing tool and I still use it in today over the more common PHP for webpage design for certain things.

    But it would seem like JAVA would be more ideal for cell phones for basic programs, however I am sure we'll see a 1001 nokia address orgainizing scripts here soon.

  • Just Rumours? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wehe ( 135130 )
    I have tried to confirm this posting at the news section of NOKIA [nokia.com]. As far as I could see there is no official news about Perl on NOKIAs phones. Perhaps we have to wait for the recently announced mobile Linux cell phones [tuxmobil.org].

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