41: What's the significance of the alpha mark (ᵀ) prefix on catalog 2 entries?

[Thomas Okken]

(01-23-2020 10:10 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  I wonder why the switch. It's not like a function couldn't take an indirect argument the way XEQ IND does if you needed a non-hard-coded argument. Was it to get around the 6-character register limit maybe? But for that matter, I wonder why the 41 doesn't support IND A.

Supporting ALPHA arguments for arbitrary programmable functions was a bit difficult on the 41 because the opcode space was pretty much used up, and XROM functions don't support arguments at all. Squeezing that in would have required some rather drastic measures in the command interpreter.

They did eventually make those changes, on a machine that had more RAM and especially ROM so that functionality could be put to good use. I'm referring, of course, to the 42S.