Is pippy alive?

[Michael.E.Ressler at jpl.nasa.gov]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2002, Jeffery D. Collins wrote:
> With regard to floating point objects, others have also asked for this
> feature to be reenabled.  I'm now looking into the code to determine
> the extent of the necessary modifications.

I'm no programmer, but if you need an enthusiastic beta tester, I hereby
volunteer. I am also on the documentation teams of a couple of open-source
projects. If you should need assistance with the docs, perhaps I can lend
a hand there.

Concerning floating point, I assume you are aware of the "mathlib" package
for the Palm? It comes with many other opensource Palm apps, and is built
into the Visors if I recall correctly. Having Pippy use mathlib for most
of the higher order math functions (sin, cos, log, etc.) should save quite
a bit on space; of course, you will still have to provide the core
floating point add, mult, etc. since the Palm doesn't have an FPU. I
played around with Quartus Forth for a while, so I know the trouble
floating point can cause on a Palm. It's also because of (the drudgery of)
Quartus Forth that I got interested in Pippy :-)

Anyway, let me know if I can contribute in some non-programming capacity.
I'll gladly repay my "whine" with a little bit of work. I actually became
aware of Python through Pippy, and its a neat language that I've already
begun to use in a number of work projects. Being able to do the same
things (at least the simpler ones) on my Palm would be way too cool :-)

Mike

-- 
Dr. Michael Ressler
Research Scientist
Astrophysics Research Element
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
ressler at cheetah.jpl.nasa.gov