I don't understand the HP-50g, what am I missing?

[bxparks]

I'm glad to hear that some people are finding this thread useful. I do want to recognize the tremendous amount of work that the developers must have spent creating this product. I am not trying to diminish their accomplishments or be unfairly critical. The 50g looks and feels like a great product. I want to like this calculator. I am just having difficulty figuring out how to use it.

In this post, I want to follow up on the topic referenced by 2-3 people, the 50g menu system.

(04-10-2024 08:28 PM)Voldemar Wrote:  There is no soft menu «button» TOOL, there is a physical button TOOL.

Are you sure that this matters? There shouldn't be any difference whether a menu gets triggered by an unshifted key (like TOOL) or a shifted key (like LeftShift+MTH or RightShift+CMPLX).

(04-11-2024 11:56 AM)David Hayden Wrote:  [...]
Menus are not hierarchical. There is no "parent menu," only the previous menu that you were using. Unfortunately, I don't think the 50g remembers more than one previous menu.
You've mentioned parent and child "folders" a few times.
[...]

You are correct that the 50g User's Guide never uses the word "folder" in the context of menus. It only uses "folder" to explain the concept of "directories" which are used to organize storage variables.

However, the 50g menu system definitely seems hierarchical to me, just like the HP-42S. A good example is the LeftShift+MTH menu, which provides at least 3 levels of hierarchy. The top-level 'MTH' menufolder has many sub menufolders, one of them is 'MTH > MATRIX' on the second level. The 'MTH > MATRIX' menufolder in turn has a 'MTH > MATRIX > MAKE' subfolder on the third level. Each sub-menufolder has a back-link to its parent menufolder.

The 50g menu system seems to have 2 types of nodes in the hierarchical tree:

- a MenuFolder, that holds one or more nodes (MenuFolder or MenuItem), and
- a MenuItem, which invokes a function, command, or operation.

I know that the 50g distinguishes between these 2 node types, because it uses 2 different icons for them: A MenuFolder has a small dash above the menu box, a MenuItem does not. That little dash turns a menu box into a file folder icon. (It was only a few weeks ago that I realized that this was a folder icon, after 10-20 years of wondering what those little lines were in screenshots of the 48-series calculators.)

One complication of the 50g menu system is that it seems to be a set of multiplely-rooted trees, not a simple singly-rooted tree. Each of the various menu buttons (e.g. TOOL, LeftShift+MTH, RightShift+CMPLX) seems to activate a separate hierarchy of menus. (Of course, internally, the 50g menu system could be implemented as a singly-rooted tree, with the top most "root" MenuFolder invisible to the user.)

The second complication is that the 50g menu system actually seems to be a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which allows the TOOL menu folder to contain a link to the STACK menufolder, which also appears in the PRG menufolder. So the STACK menufolder has 2 parents. If the menu system was strictly hierarchical, every node would have only a single parent. But I think it is convenient to continue to think of the menu system as mostly a set of singly-rooted trees.

Anyway, that's my mental model of the 50g menu system. If I think of it as an arbitrary directed graph (i.e. like a set of HTML hyperlinks), I get lost in a sea of proliferating menu items. A hierarchical organization is easier to remember and navigate. I think my biggest complaint about the 50g menu system is that it is difficult to navigate for a new user who is exploring the features of the calculator.

Brian