33S Alternatives

[David Hayden]

For programmers, the great thing about the WP34 is local registers. Programs can allocate their own storage registers. They are automatically deallocated when the program returns. There's no more worrying whether R07 (or whatever) of some program conflicts with some other program, or your current usage of the register.

The DM32 has similar functionality in state files. You can call a program in one state file from another. I don't recall the details, but there is a combination of local and global registers in the state files.

The line-number addressing on the 35s is helpful when branching backwards, but if you're going forwards, you need to guess at the line number, continue programming, then go back and replace the branch. Maybe I just didn't get the hang of it, but I've always found it frustrating. It would have been great if you could program with labels and then just delete the labels to have the branches replaced with line-number branches instead, but it doesn't work that way. Line number branches adjust when you edit your program, but only for branches with in the current label.

Dave