[Lazarus] Coding A PDA

[Paul Breneman]

Hi Josh,

> I've been programming for about 5 years, and I'm quite young in age. I just love programming so much. Ever since I  tried a program at school called Scratch, which uses a basic language in the form of GUI blocks.  
> In my life, I would like to code a PDA
> I know it's far-fetched, and I would have to become much more advanced.  I would really love to have some sort of handheld device with a keyboard in my pocket, I would take it out, and boot it up, and have a command line show up(Maybe GUI), displaying 'Welcome to blablabla' or something. And then I type in commands or navigate via the keypad to achieve things. 
> I probably sound extremely childish...
> Has anyone had experience in writing a handheld device before? If anyone has, could that person please give a overly-simplified overview on how to achieve this?
> I'm sure it's much much harder than it looks, I would probaly have to become 30 years more advanced in this to even hope to achieve coding a PDA. 

Do you already have a PDA you'd like to program?

With FreePascal it is getting easier to program PDAs, especially if the 
PDA runs Linux.  I have posted some minimal FreePascal distributions on 
this page:
   http://www.turbocontrol.com/helloworld.htm

Those distro contains the compiler and everything you need to easily 
compile and test a simple program.  With Linux you might be able to 
compile directly on the PDA, and even use fpGUI if you need a simple GUI 
program.  For WinCE I only have a cross-compile fpGUI distro available 
at this time though it should be possible to compile directly on a WinCE 
device.

-- 
Regards,
Paul Breneman
www.dbReplication.com - VCL database replication components
www.TurboControl.com - Hardware and software development services
- Educational programming project for environment monitoring
- Information on using FreePascal for embedded systems
- Support information for the TurboPower open source libraries