HP-35’s x^y Why?

[ijabbott]

(11-02-2021 04:22 PM)cdmackay Wrote:  As a related question, I've often wondered why, after the 28S, HP started including the arguably unnecessary n-th root key, e.g. on 32SII, 48GX, 50g, Prime, when they'd done perfectly fine without it up til then? It doesn't save keystrokes, since it's generally a shifted fn when included.

It would make sense if the n-th root key returned a real root when Y is negative and X is an odd integer. The Prime does that, but the 50g doesn't. The 32SII doesn't like fractional powers of negative numbers, but is happy to do odd integer n-th roots of negative numbers.