Logical shift Project home

Abstract

Mobile devices are increasingly becoming part of everyday life. However, their functionality is usually limited only to that which is designed into them by their manufacturors. It would be useful to provide a microlanguage portable to many mobile devices that allows users to write simple programs to further automate their devices, and to allow content provides, such as WAP sites, to increase the interactivity of their content.

Notes

• 'Mobile devices' in this context includes devices such as mobile phones, Palm Pilots, Psion organisers and so on. Many of these devices cannot run large pieces of software even though they may have a large amount of memory. In particular, stack size and dynamic memory may be noticably low.
• Security concerns of dynamic content will be discussed
• It may be that this language has two forms - a simplified, imperitive form, designed for entry on the simple controls of a mobile device, and a more complex form designed for compilation.
• A good case study of a 'microlanguage' is the Z-Machine format designed by Infocom for the design of interactive fiction. Of particular note, the Z-Machine can completely save its internal state in a machine-independant manner, and uses a paged-memory scheme to work around the limitations of the microcomputers of the early 80s. Quite complex systems (for instance a Scheme interpreter) have been created for the Z-Machine, even though its design is focused towards text adventures.