Question about HP71B Variable Names

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, Gene:

(01-19-2021 06:57 PM)Gene Wrote:  Speed comparisons from Joe Horn in the PPC Computer Journal using some common BASIC benchmarks. Attached is the PDF - Valentin, let's see if you can read this. :-)

Yes, I could, thanks for caring !  

My problem is usually restricted to Dropbox and other such obnoxious services, a simple direct link to the PDF file works as a charm every time. As for J. Horn's speed comparison, some comments. Joe says:

Horn Wrote:VAL (actually evaluates a string as if it were a math expression of any complexity)

Not only of any complexity but of any size too. Evaluating math expressions from the command line is limited to less than 100 characters long and a similar limit applies to expressions in program lines, but the string VAL evaluates isn't limited that way.

Look at the Step the Third subchallenge in my Short & Sweet Math Challenges #23: "May the 4th Be With You !" Special (looky here), where VAL evaluates a 1,307-character string, then a 2,708-char one. The function arguments for FNROOT and INTEGRAL aren't limited in size either.

Horn Wrote:CALC (a fast claculator (sic) mode)

"Claculator", indeed, it does nothing but claculate, a lot, where "claculate" stands for any of the usual four-letter curses. As for "fast", Joe was surely kidding.

Horn Wrote:The table below shows how fast the HP-71B and some other small computers run seven BASIC benchmark programs [...]

These kind of benchmarks were useless to me to determine whether to invest a significant time and effort (i.e., money) in adapting our engineering software to run in the HP-71B or not, so I created fully-optimized benchmarks which specifically reflected what our engineering software internally needed to do, using the machine's capabilities to the fullest (variables' precision, ROMs, even LEX files).

That's the kind of benchmark you need to see if the speed is adequate and avoid wasting money if not, and I saw that the HP-71B was useable but 3x slower than the slowest competitor. In the end we discarded it and the HP-75C and went for the HP-86/87, then the HP-150/150II, then the HP-9816/26/36, then the Vectra Series, etc. The HP-71B just couldn't compare for medium/large engineering projects for speed and cost reasons, amongst others.

At the time, I saw it as more appropriate for such things as controlling lab instrumentation and things like that (UK's NHS, for instance). One of my friends used it to gather data from instruments atop mountain locations to afterwards transfer them to his HP-150 at home for heavy-duty processing and plotting (DIN A0) the results.

Best regards.
V.