Question about HP71B Variable Names

[Garth Wilson]

Quote:Yes I have written a similar program on the PC that replaces long variable names with 71B-BASIC-compliant names.

I did it on the 71 itself, before I ever had a PC.

Quote:Another concern is speed, the HP-71B is quite a slow beast (even back at the time, as compared to the HP-75C or the HP-85, say, about 5x slower)

Do you have any speed comparisons, for different types of benchmarks? I know it was slower for something like a FOR...NEXT loop (probably because the 75 had a wider data bus), but I think the 71 was much, much faster in math that involved the math module. The two computers had approximately the same clock speed, but the 71 could address eight times as much memory (which was great for when I had 128KB arrays plus all my programs in RAM), had a better BASIC, (I think) bigger registers (64-bit, and I can't find the 75's register size but I think it's 8-bit), and the 71 had the benefit of a ton of great LEX files not only from HP but also from the users' groups. I wrote my very capable text editor mentioned above (which includes the search-and-replace, with wildcard capability too) to include a lot of great LEX files from the Paris users' group, material that was published in the CHHU Chronicle.