I’ve been playing with Jarkko Hietaniemi’s port of Perl for Series 60 Symbian devices on my Nokia 7610.
There is a lot of work to be done on it still, but it works, and I can run simple Perl scripts.
The screenshot above show’s me running a simple script to list the contents of the Lifeblog directory on my series 7610 phone. Here’s the code that was run on the phone to generate the listing.
my $directory = "C:\system\Data\lifeblog\";
print "$directoryn";
opendir(DIR,$directory);
foreach my $file (readdir(DIR)) {
print "$filen";
}
closedir(DIR);
sleep(5);
As you can see it’s simple stuff. I added the sleep(5) at the end just to allow me to take a screenshot as when the script has been run it prompts you to press any key to exit. In this case, the screenshot key, caused an exit. 🙂
It may not look much, but it’s bloody exciting stuff for me. The possibility of running decent Perl applications on my phone has me salivating in anticipation of the next release. At present the version out there (0.1.0) doesn’t offer any interface into the native Symbian libraries from Perl, but I’m sure that will be changing soon.
It’s easy to write simple scripts, as all I had to do for this one was to just drop it into the Perl directory on my memory card (via Nokai PC Suite) and use the PerlApp application supplied in the Symbian distribution.
The Python guys are luckier to have a fuller featured release of their favourite scripting language, but watch out, the Perl Mongers are coming!