Quote:
>>I've just received my copy of J ver 4 and am intrigued by it. I'm considering
>>the purchase of a plamtop computer such as the HP95LX or Poqet. Has anyone
>>in this newsgroup tried J/PC on one of these machines? If so, was performance
>>adequate? If tried on the HP95, how does J work with the 40 column screen?
>Eugene McDonnell had J running on an HP 95LX at APL91 last summer. He
>was quite pleased with it. I have forwarded your posting to him,
>and will attempt to post his reply, if any.
HP has just come out with an ungraded version of their 95LX
"palmtop" computer, bringing the RAM up to 1 MB. (Check out the
comments in comp.sys.palmtops.) I too was intrigued by the idea
of running J on a superportable platform ( 6.25" x 3.5" x 1")
and am now trying it out. So far:
(1) It does work. I ftp'ed the waterloo PC j version 4.0 to
a Sun SPARC. Transffered from there by the serial cable into the
95LX using kermit, the j.exe file does run without any obvious
problems. Of course, J thinks it has 80 columns and the 95LX has
only 40. You can scroll over to see the other columns, but it
would be nice to have a version of J that just used 40 columns.
(2) It is *not* fast. Now J is not fast on a SPARC, but on
a 95 you can go for a cup of coffee while it inverts a 3 x 3
matrix. So don't count on using this setup for much in the way
of computation. On the other hand, there is something odd about
the 95 in that is seems to run several times faster when powered
by an AC adapter than by its AA cells. Haven't figured that out
yet.
(3) With the 1 MB RAM, the 248 KB that J uses leaves plenty
of room for whatever else you want run on the 95. It is perfect
for working your way through the examples in Iverson books. So
now you can use those wasted hours in airports, etc. learning J.
And when you discover some wonderful idioms, you can transfer
the workspace - just a text file - into a real computer and go
from there.
Pat Harrington
J on Palmtops