A Free42 (and HP42S) tricky question

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, Thomas Okken and David Britten:

Thank you very much for your recommendations, they're both essentially identical and indeed answer my questions and solve my problem satisfactorily, though I'd still prefer to use EXIT to close the editor and continue execution rather than R/S, it would be more consistent and easier for the user to remember but never mind.

A few comments:

Thomas Okken Wrote:[...] only a few instructions are supposed to cause program execution to halt — STOP, PROMPT, INPUT, RTN with no pending returns, VIEW and AVIEW with flag 21 set and flag 55 clear, and GETKEY and PSE.

Yes, but all those intructions are intended to either precisely stop execution altogether (STOP and RTN with no pending returns) or else to stop execution momentarily to give the user the opportunity to do something: either enter data with PROMPT, INPUT and GETKEY, or see/write down data with VIEW, AVIEW and PSE.

As EDIT is obviously intended to give the user the opportunity to do something, namely either enter data or review data, it clearly belongs to that class of instructions and thus should also stop execution momentarily as they do, that much is obvious to anyone. Having EDIT continue program execution is abnormal and serves no useful purpose.

I wonder if for Free42 you could have EDIT continue program execution (default) or momentarily stop program execution and resuming once the user exits from the matrix editor by pressing EXIT, depending on the status of some unused system flag. If the flag is clear, it defaults to continuing execution. If the flag is set, execution stops while the user uses the matrix editor and resumes once the user exits it.

This would be very easy to implement, compatible with everything and would make EDIT and EDITN comfortably usable in program mode, righting an obvious wrong.

Thanks again and best regards.
V.