Catalog instructions and skins ( hpprime (simulated) ) in n languages.

[Tim Wessman]

There are multiple problems with translation of language keywords, which is why it really is not done anywhere with regularity for any math/science/programming language or text.

1. Like it or not, english is the defacto language for math/science/programming at the moment.
2. Instead of now having ~1000 commands, you've now created 8000 or more. This means that the chances for collisions with reserved commands has gone way, way up. It makes writing user programs, and SHARING them much more difficult.
3. It makes it much more difficult to find help for the functions. You can no longer search "HP PRIME CHOOSE" and get help on the internet. Don't happen to have much localize help from others about that in your language? Too bad. You won't find it due to the "helpful" keyword translation.
4. Since no serious calculator has on-screen keyboards (classpad doesn't count, they are specifically banned most places due to this), optimizing for each language is essentially impossible. It makes it really, really bad to use for some languages. Things aren't ideal now, so why make it even worse?

Basically, though. It seems like it would be a good idea, but in reality isn't for these and several other reasons.

Maybe you should be asking the other manufacturers why no other calculator has integrated contextual help? Why they don't have about 300 pages of documentation built in for each language on each device at the touch of a button? :-)


Feel free to make your own skins. We made it really easy to do so...