Table of Contents for 48G AUR

[Liam Hays]

Hi,

amalahama Wrote:I would like to start with RPL too and since it seems lot of useful beginner information is being posted here I have several questions to ask:

Well, I'm no expert, but I can try to help. Do you have a calculator? If you have a 49/50, I personally don't own one and can't offer much help there. If you have a 48 then I can offer some help. Are you trying to learn User- or System-RPL?

amalahama Wrote:* Do you normally program in the HP48 directly or use your computer? What's the best IDE for RPL available?

There are reasons to use both. For example, it can be nice to have a development package on your 48 for small tests and experimentation, but larger projects demand a computer, because typing on the 48's keyboard is difficult at best.

As you likely know, you need extra programs or libraries to do anything besides User-RPL programming on the 48. I, and probably everybody else here, recommend Jazz for that, because Jazz is stable, fast, and can compile both System-RPL and assembly programs. (If you're low on memory, try out my stripped-down version of Jazz. It takes out some features I don't use, and you probably don't need.)

On the computer side, you have more choices. For Windows, as John Keith said, Debug4x is a great choice. I decided to try it out for a project recently, on a secondary computer, and the debugging features are incredibly useful. You can set breakpoints in your code, and then view the stack and any other parts of the RPL operating system, including the processor's registers, at any point in your code as it runs in an emulator. It's really cool!

On Linux, where I normally work, I've been using HP Tools patched with this patch. I just type System-RPL source into a text file and follow the instructions for compilation in Donnelly's book, available from the docs section above.

Finally, for raw User-RPL, I don't know about any IDEs. I just type it into a text file and send it to the calculator. It works fine for me, though I don't get syntax highlighting or any fancy features.

Quote:* In case you program directly in your HP48, is there a way to minimally ident the code as you write?

I use MiniWriter, which has the ability to automatically indent on each new line. TED, which is included in one of my light builds of Jazz, can also indent automatically.


All in all: you can program on both the 48 and a computer, the best IDE is Debug4x, and MiniWriter and TED (and probably others, too) can auto-indent.

I hope that was helpful.