DM-42 and WP-43S

[Paul Dale]

The development process and environment are important and are still to be defined. The editor people use is a personal choice -- I know Marcus and I use different editors and likely Walter uses a third.

As for code, most of the mathematical code exists from the 34S project, a few of these functions could do with a rewrite but this is relatively minor (okay it isn't really). This comes to about a third of the 34S firmware, most of the rest needs doing for the 43S. This includes:

• C++ wrapper around the decimal library.
• Hardware support (which needs hardware, so will have to wait but this can be abstracted).
• Display driver (abstracted from the hardware)
• Emulator framework, possibly based on existing code from other projects (KML scripts).
• New assembler, NOT written in Perl but in C/C++ (which would allow embedding in the emulator).
• User code debugger.
• Build system (marvin?). We've made horrible decisions in the past. If you manage to set up the build environment for WP-34S on Windows or Linux you know what I mean.
• Typed registers (int, real, complex, string, ...)
• User interface (keyboard handling and screen display, ideally table driven)
• Internal function opcodes need a complete rework
• Better error handling
• Memory management
• OP code design that supports variable length instructions
• User code SST+BST
• Dispatcher for user code
• Instruction display for screen and printer.
  

And of course items will have been missed.

Marcus and I have reasonable ideas as to how some of this will need to work.


Pauli