HP-35s New Moon Lander behavior

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, burkhard:

(04-26-2019 05:49 PM)burkhard Wrote:  [...] seems like a the checksum comes from a hidden roulette wheel program with 2^16 "checksum slots" for the ball to drop into.

Yes, sort of.

Quote:I so want to like this calculator, but such things drive me nuts.

The HP35s is a nice calculator, potentially even very good, but it simply has too many flaws and bugs, which ultimately get on the nerves till the breaking point comes by and you simply can't stand it anymore.

That's what happened to me. I was very interested in the HP35s the moment I knew of its existence and then I was presented with one. Initially I was delighted with it and used a lot of free time to get to know it, even wrote a number of non-trivial programs for it (two of them were published somewhere). So far so good.

But then I began to be really annoyed with the preposterous function set and badly implemented capabilities, most specially the abysmal handling of complex numbers and operations, same for vectors, same for memory management, same for number bases other than 10, automatic renumbering that you had to fight against and which would create erroneous branching when and where you least expected it, etc, etc.

Then, in case that wasn't enough, there were lots and lots of bugs, some incredibly frustrating as the infamous checksums which were so poorly implemented that completely defeated the purpose (so you couldn't quickly check if the automatic renumbering had gone astray again) and rendered the feature useless, and many others which ultimately affected usability, from forcing you to lose all your programs to simply destroying your confidence in the results you were getting, matter of fact I found that I simply couldn't trust the machine.

Eventually, after getting endlessly frustrated by the former and mercilessly stung by the latter, I simply gave up. I stopped using it or writing any programs for it and so it actually resides in my collection, well cared for but utterly unused, and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

A real pity, it could've been a really great product if HP would have cared in the least.

V.
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