HP15c CE: 8x8 equation system

[Valentin Albillo]

      
Hi, Steve Simpkin,

(05-14-2023 07:33 PM)Steve Simpkin Wrote:  You, yourself mention some of the HP-71B's limitations in less than glowing terms

Correct. And I can add some more to the ones you quoted, for instance:

• CALC mode is an utterly useless abomination that wastes at least 2.5 Kb of precious System ROM space which could've been put to much better use, e.g. including sorely needed additional string functions (RPT$, TRIM%, REV$, REPLACE$, NOC, etc.) or structured statements (REPEAT..UNTIL, WHILE..END WHILE, LOOP..END LOOP, SELECT..CASE..END SELECT, EXIT FOR, etc.)
        
• USING / IMAGE processing is incredibly slow, the whole shebang having an unnecessarily complicated syntax while also having glaring limitations. Probably J-F Garnier could find out exactly how much System ROM space is wasted implementing this overbloated feature but it surely exceeds even CALC's wastefulness.
        
• INTEGER operations being slower than REAL ones is counterintuitive and frankly appalling, to say the least.
        
• User-defined functions have large overheads, which significantly slows down their execution and uses lots of RAM to define and invoke, so much in fact that it frequently pays off to use subroutines instead. They also lack LOCAL variables, passing arguments by reference, accepting array/matrix arguments, etc., which are all glaring limitations (among others) which greatly detract from their usefulness.
        
• etc., etc. (variables implementation and handling, ...)

The difference between me and Kahan is that he's quite dismissive of the HP-71B but enthralled and deeply in love with the HP-15C, while I'm fully aware of the HP-71B's shortcomings but I do dearly love both the HP-15C and the HP-71B, warts and all.

Regards.
V.