HP50G Menus

[Marco Polo]

(05-25-2022 11:23 PM)Joe Horn Wrote:  

(05-25-2022 03:59 PM)Marco Polo Wrote:  I realized that some menus are (more or less) duplicated without any apparent reason, at least at my eyes. ... and the "obscure" MENU 93 containing only some math commands.
This is quite confusing to me and even disturbing having a very light OCD :-)

Such organization comes from original 49g and was left intact in the evolution to 49g+/48gII/50g.

Anybody can explain what is the rational, if any, behind these choices?

You answered your own question. Menu 93 on the 50g is the same as the left-shift 9 menu on the HP 48. Since RPL programs can contain the command 93 MENU (or 93 TMENU), that menu was included in the 50g for software compatibility. It is not included in any keyboard menu because the 50g has more functions than the HP 48, so the 50g has many "new, improved" menus. So the old "obsolete" menus are there so that the user instructions in old RPL programs will still work, and the new menus are there because they are more complete.

That being said, I personally found the whole thing just as confusing at first as you did, and that's why I wrote Appendix H for the HP 50g Advanced Users Reference Manual, which lists all the 50g menus, identifying which ones are "legacy" (AKA "abandoned") menus from the HP 48.

I understand the needs of backward compatibility.
What i don't understand is the presence of very similar menus, being one a subset or a superset of the other, or bringing completely different functions for the same matter.
For example menu 130 (OrangeShft+1) is a subset of menu 20 (MTH--->CMPLX) plus the "i".
Furthermore, there is MAIN-->MATHS-->CMPLX

There are many other examples:
MTH-->MATR (Menu 5)
MATRICES (Whiteshtf+5) (menu 129)
MAIN-->MATHS-->MATR

And much more

In this way if you need a specific function you may have to look into several menus, often buried under other menus

Imho a more rational way would have been to expand the MTH (Whiteshft+SYMB) menu and submenus and map it to the shortcuts on keys 1 to 9: no additional menus, backward compatibility ensured being the 48g menus a subset of 49g.
Eventually separating CAS only functions, to be put into SYMB menu