Undocummented (?) limits for the HP50g

[ttw]

Experimentally, I found that the HP50g cannot convert binary numbers of more than about 38 bits correctly to and from decimal. Likewise, such numbers do not compare correctly nor sort correctly. MAX and MIN do seem to work as do addition and subtraction.

I'm doing more checking as most of the work I've done with large integers (for creating pseudo-random number generators) is suspect. I haven't yet checked things like POWMOD and its relatives using large moduli.

It appears that binary strings (supposedly up to 64 bits) are manipulated with floating-point procedures. Setting the binary length to 64 doesn't help.

I suppose I could use MAX and MIN and add and subtract to do comparisons (if the sign doesn't turn up with ? rather than 0 or 1.)

I'll probably just re-write my large integer Fortran package for the PC; it's several thousand times faster but Windows 10 doesn't run my programming assistants.