Programming challenges: processing vectors and matrices

[ttw]

(02-14-2019 12:10 PM)grsbanks Wrote:  Given what a vector actually represents I'm not sure what practical applications these things could have, but on the 50g at least you could always use AXL to convert to a list, do whatever you need on the resulting list and then use AXL to convert back to a vector.

This is what I do. Many things in the HP50g are strange Vectors can be reals or integers but REPL doesn't work with reals. Vectors cannot handle binary integers (although lists can) so I have to do lots of real (actually integers) to binary converts and the like to do logic.

I haven't checked if two dimensional lists work better or worse than two dimensional arrays. Of course, once I go to 3 or 4 dimensions I have to use lists. Sub only works on one-dimensional lists.

On the other hand, 2-d lists do allow extraction of a "column" (or row) easily; one doesn't get to go both ways without being able to do TRAN or TRN (neither of which work on all types.) It would be nice to get a single row or column of a matrix; currently I just convert the matrix to rows (or columns) and make a list of these. This can take lots of stacksmanship.