Prime second attempt

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

The 48 series is based on an "open" workspace design; The idea that you have a generic, unbounded workspace where you can do anything. Where anything can be everything.

This is very adapted to broad discipline problem and knowledgeable people like trained engineers. BUT, it requires said people to know where they are coming from, where they are going, and how to get there. The 48 series is more like an open, white sheet of paper to work with. It can be intimidating to beginners.

Prime's prime design (pun intended) is education (like the 38 on witch it is based), with narrow (or at least narrower) problems to work on (problems limited to one field), and used by learners, people who do NOT yet master a subject and needs some guidance in the way... This is why the system is much more bounded, with "locations" for various types of activities and a relative "non interference model" between said activities. Prime is more like a guided worksheet to work with.



This is the "prime" design guidelines (not "rule"), HOWEVER, we, the Prime programmers are also engineers, so we have still put in place a LOT of measures/bridges allowing to cross from one "sandbox" to the other. This allows 50g type users to still use the Prime without being blocked in their track (although it is a little bit less convenient than on the 50g). But there is only so much we can do without breaking the initial design.

Regarding the dual CAS and Home modes. They are 2 reasons for this "split personality".
One is historical and technical. Originally, the 39GII+ on which prime is based did NOT have cas (At the time of design, CAS was not well accepted in large parts of the world, so we decided not put put CAS). When we worked on Prime, we added CAS, but it did not integrate easelyl with the rest of the system, so it was easier to separate it from the Home.

Along these "pragmatic" reasons, there is also the fact that I have a split personality :-) I have various activities in my life that require a calculator. Some of these require "formal" maths (when I program, I often need symbolic answers), but when I am in the workshop, I mostly require numerical answers (If I have to cut a 198cm board in 4, knowing that I need to cut at 99/2 cm is useless, there is not 99/2 mark on my tape measurer!) This made me realise that various math problems need different modes, and that one might want to switch easly and quickly from one to the other without loosing the previous work. This, in some ways is one of the reasons for the separate modes...

Cyrille