HP-71B Enhanced Math LEX

[Valentin Albillo]

.
Hi, John:

(08-09-2020 02:16 PM)John Keith Wrote:  

(08-08-2020 10:14 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  For interested people, this is a direct link to the PDF article describing in detail my proposals, click it to see or download:

                  HP-71B Math Pac 2 Comments and Proposals.

I strongly second the request for a SORT command. As far as scalar functions I would also like to see the LOGGAMMA function which returns LN(Gamma(x)) accurately for large values of x.

Having such functions available would be nice, John, but consider that only 5 Kb are available for implementing all enhanced capabilities, thus we can't fit everything that comes to mind, only the absolutely most generally useful functions and only if they don't take too many bytes to implement, some of which are the ones (22, all fiiting in about 3.5 Kb) that my proposal addresses.

Just for instance, Sorting is a generally useful functionality for most everyone, and frequently used. On the other hand, your proposed LogGamma is a very specialized function useful to a handful of people, and rarely used.

In other words, we can't go and suggest every fancy function or functionality under the sun, a fair amount of pondering is mandatory to select the most useful, affordable functionalities, which is just what I did in my proposal. I didn't select the first functions that came to mind or that I personally liked the most, but instead I carefully pondered what would be the most generally useful while still affordable.

There's also the fact that Jean-François is the one who will have to use tons of his free time to do the implementation, not an easy or enjoyable task, so a further restriction is to select functionalities that aren't too hard and/or time-consuming to implement in assembler, out of deference and respect for J-F.

This means that, for non-trivial functionalities, it's mandatory to supply J-F with the full algorithm, highly-optimized (but simple) working code and comprehensive sample results, for he to just first convert it to assembler and afterwards check the assembler results vs. the working code and the sample results, for correctness.

This I'm willing to provide for each of my 22 proposed keywords.

Regards.
V.