HP-29C: 98 Program Steps, So, why not an even 100?

[teenix]

(09-01-2019 03:12 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  Thanks Tony. Quite odd and from a programming sense I imagine pretty inconvenient, to have these Nj bytes stored in such a non-sequential way, jumping here and there in a non-obvious pattern. Why not just from 0/1 to 2/3, to 4/5, etc. and then on to the next register, so just incrementing upwards?

No doubt there is a good answer (there always is) but it just seems strange.

Thanks again.

It is probably something to do with how the programmers used the P register which is used for indexing the nibbles inside registers. I haven't checked through the code as the financial algorithms are usually complex, lengthy and hard to trace through.

cheers

Tony