To help you understand how PPL 2.1 connects to your device and what technologies are being used, we have prepared a little diagram that explains the connection flows.

When you run a program on your computer instead of the device, the connection flow is almost the same. PPL IDE creates a local TCP/IP server, launches PPL 2 interpreter which in turn connects to the local server.

After some really hard thinking (ouch it hurts), I finally found a nice way to simplify the interpreter internals and to speed up the execution speed. I don’t have any benchmarks yet but it should be noticeable at the very least.

As an example, a 89 opcodes test code turns out to be 66 opcodes in length. So we get better speed and smaller bytecode files.

As a nice surprise, there is a new function called PushList() in PPL that pushes each element of a list to the stack. As an example check the following:

func Test:3
list(l$);
Add(10, 20, 30);
return(PushList(l$));
end;

This can prove to be very useful in some cases. There are many uses for such a function too. I hope you will appreciate (I am sure you are) all the hard work I am putting into PPL 2.

Here we go, the future is here, well almost anyway…

This post will detail some of the new paths that the PPL product will take very soon.

Starting with 1.53, the protection in the PIDE will be much simpler than before. There used to be some very complicated copy protection but unfortunately it caused more problems than expected.

Starting with 1.60 (which is the next release after 1.53 and the last 1.x release) will be very different. The compiler/interpreter (PPL.EXE) will be entirely free. You won’t be able to generate executable files or change file’s icons directly from the pocket pc anymore. The generation of executable files will only be possible from the PIDE program on the desktop. The editor and visual form builder PPL programs will be maintained by the community and not be officially supported by ArianeSoft anymore.

The same will still be true with version 2.0. The compiler/interpreter will remain free. The PIDE will be able to compress your executables on the fly.