(Off Topic) Postage-stamp computers

Fingo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I just took a class on programing postage-stamp computers, Those things are damn cool, except they run on this annoying simplified BASIC. Does anyone know of a company that makes these with a slightly more functional language such as C? By the way, the site is http://www.parallaxinc.com.

Comment on (Off Topic) Postage-stamp computers

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Re: (Off Topic) Postage-stamp computers by bikeNomad (Priest) on Jul 14, 2001 at 06:11 UTC
Well, that's not a widely accepted term. But there are lots of little microcontrollers out there, including the Basic Stamp boards. Most of them don't run their own language interpreters, though, so you have to cross-compile. That is, you have to write your program, and feed it into a compiler running on a a more normal computer. Then you load the compiled program into the little device. If you want to run Perl, you'll need a more serious machine, and one that actually has an operating system. http://linuxdevices.com focuses on embedded computers that can run Linux (and hence Perl). There are a number of vendors who provide cross C compilers for small microcontrollers.	[reply]
Re: (Off Topic) Postage-stamp computers by jepri (Parson) on Jul 14, 2001 at 19:45 UTC
Given the fact that you need a special editor and program to use the chip, I'd say the BASIC is being compiled. so from that point of view the basic is just an abstraction of the underlying chipset. The ARM series of processors are well known for having a bit of grunt and enough memory to do some tricky stuff with. They can be programmed in C. At the really low end there are the legendary 'PIC' chips, available from many electronics retailers. They are programmed in assembler and only have a few hundred bytes of memory. ____________________ Jeremy I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.	[reply]

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