HP 38G: Bug List Definitive - 4 Bugs in Total

[Gerald H]

(03-16-2015 07:25 PM)BruceH Wrote:  Colin Croft did a lot of excellent work with the 38G when it first came out. Unfortunately he doesn't have a bug list in one place so you have to look through his site.

You can cheat a bit by putting "site:www.hphomeview.com bug" into Google.

In the FAQs referenced in the link I can not reproduce the behaviour in #22:

22. Is there a bug in the Sequence aplet?
Yes, as a matter of fact there is!
Let's see first how it's supposed to work:
In the Sequence aplet, enter 1 into U1(1), nothing into U1(2) and U1(N-1)+3 into U1(N). You should find that it ticks the U1(1) and U1(N) entries and that changing to the NUM view shows the correct sequence of 1, 4, 7...
SHIFT CLEAR to get rid of it.
Now enter nothing into U1(1) and U1(2). Enter 2^N into U1(N). Notice that when you enter a non iterative formula into U1(N) you don't need to supply the first and second values - it works them out for you.
SHIFT CLEAR again
Now the bug:
Enter 3 into U1(1) and U1(N-1)+2 into U1(N). What should happen is the same as the first example above. Instead, you will find that it calculates the value of U1(2). The problem is that it does it incorrectly! It does 3+2 and gets 4!!!!
It only happens (as far as I can discover) with those numbers. Don't ask me what made me try them - I do a LOT of testing of calculators for HP and you'd be amazed at the weird things I try in an effort to find bugs before the calculator is released. I've reported this to HP but it's so minor that I doubt it will be fixed. For those who are programmers, I seem to recall that the guru of the operating system told me that it was a pointer error.


My calculator sequence aplet will only tick if values are entered for the two initial terms.

Does anyone have a different experience?