>  i believe a .prc or .pdb file in palm ram is NOT FRAGMENTED. :)
>  (at least, each resource chunk isn't). you can get a reference to
>  the start of your .pdb and read it from there using a pointer.

Oh my goodness, this would be so incredibly unlikely to work in practice
that it isn't even worth considering.  In development situations where
you've got an empty device, yes, the resources will probably be contiguous.
But your real users will have stuff on their devices, and things get moved
around, re-compacted, etc.  Things will be fragmented nearly all the time
in the real world.

Resources can move in memory any time that they're not locked.  Plus, the
headers for the chunks will be different, and of different sizes, on
various OS releases.  Whenever some app is deleted, there's a hole, and the
next thing to get installed might end up partially inside that hole, and
perhaps partially outside of it.

This is no different from saying "well, usually a file will be contiguous
on my hard drive, so I'll just do a low level read of the sectors and cross
my fingers."  No sane person would take that risk if they knew how things
work even in general.

In short, this is a wildly bad idea, no matter what OS version you're on.
(No offense to Aaron - perhaps he's had lots of cold medicine today or
something...)

-David Fedor
Palm, Inc.

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