[no subject]

[Tom Pike <thwpike@...>]

G'day All,

	I am a developer for the P3 Project (Providing Palms for the Poor).
Our aim is to break the poverty cycle by providing information and other
technology services to those who are amongst the world's poorest.  We
have had a pilot project in Soppeng, Indonesia, where farmers were
provided with information about Biocycle farming.  The information was
provided using the Palm platform, all of which were donated.

	In the future we are looking to develop an ultra cheap platform that
will be able to provide these information and other technology services.
At this point in time we are using a customised Linux distribution as
the operating system, and we are looking for our language of choice.

	The hardware is our constraining factor.  We have a rather fixed amount
of memory/storage etc.  The desire is to fit as much information onto
each device as possible, so any wasted space due to bulky languages is a
source of concern.  Memory usage is also a concern, and stability is
vital.

	We are well aware of Lua's small footprint, and this is a great
advantage to us (I read a thread about how to reduce the size of Python,
eventually it recommended using Lua!).  We are also very aware that our
language selection has to be a good one as we will be tying ourselves to
it for a few years once going to production.

	What we are seeking at this point is any information that would help us
on this decision.  Does anyone have experience using Lua in an embedded
environment (as in hardware embedded, rather than software)? Or even in
a handheld environment?

	Comments, suggestions etc would be most gratefully received.  For more
information, there is a P3 web site: http://www.p3international.org


		Many thanks,

		Tom Pike

	
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| Tom Pike thwpike@p3international.org     |
| P3 International www.p3international.org |
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