Please can you beta-test this unusual Free42 skin

[Thomas Okken]

(10-28-2023 06:21 PM)dm319 Wrote:  A dangerous thing to do! I guess there is always that balance between something that is easy to input using a small grid of keys on a calculator, and the readability of something with structured programming. Do you think you could have a transpiler and code editor on the device, or are you thinking this is better on your PC?

On the device. Note that this is how the Plus42 PARSE function works already: it parses the equation, and then from the parse tree, it generates an RPN program.

RPL has very simple syntax, which makes it easy to parse. Code generation is generally a lot harder, but generating code for the Free42 / Plus42 RPN dialect is actually very easy, because it supports all the important constructs, like the dynamic RPN stack, deep RTN stack, and named local variables.

I wouldn't be surprised if writing a good code editor turned out be a greater challenge than writing an RPL-to-RPN compiler. Maybe I'll get into it and find out, once I'm happy with Plus42 and Free42 and don't have any other big stuff left on my to-do list.