Fixed to Scientific notation - transition of numerical display

[Johnh]

This is a simple thing but it's a bit of an annoyance IMO:

As an engineer, I normally want to see 4 or 5 decimal places on my calcs. But on all the HP's that I've seen either in person or as emulations, if you set say FIX 4, and start generating smaller numbers, you start to lose digits until the machine swaps to a scientific notation.

eg, If you set FIX 4 and take the square root of 2, divided by successive factors of 10:

1.4142
0.1414
0.0141
0.0014
0.0001
1.4142 E-5
1.4142 E-6 etc

Excel (general format), and various school calculators, swap to scientific display while there's still enough digits on view.

Obviously, it's not a real show-stopper, and engineers and others have worked with this behaviour for 50 years. But it would be great to have a mode that did something like this:

1.4142
0.14142
0.014142
0.0014142
1.4142 E-4
1.4142 E-5 etc

Any comments?