Why HP 42S for Electrical Engineering?

[lemontea]

(06-01-2017 06:05 AM)pier4r Wrote:  

(06-01-2017 12:57 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  The RPL machines (48/49/50 series) are far more capable, but they're RPL, which differs greatly from RPN.

Could you elaborate on this? For my little knowledge, Rpl is a superset of rpn (well mostly) in terms of what one can do, so I don't understand your statement.

The way you program the calculators is different.

On the 15C (and I assume all other "RPN" calculators) you enter Program mode through g + P/R (Program/Run mode change). I also have the 11C and it works the same.

Then, f LBL A (program label A), then enter the sequence of keystrokes you want to execute. Then you end with R/S (run/stop). And exit Program mode (P/R).

Now you enter your variables onto the stack or store them, and run program A, f A (or, in USER mode, just press A).

On the 48G series, you do not do this.

You create a program OBJECT.

That object is delimited by << and >>

You type the program object onto a single line, which would basically be the same sequence you entered into the 15C.

Now you ENTER that and put it onto the stack.

Now, press ' (single quotes) and type in the program name (basically, the variable to which you want to store this program object), and ENTER.

Program object is now Stack Level 2, and program variable name is Stack 1.

Press STO (store).

Now it's stored.

To execute it, you can simply display all your variables, with the VAR key.

The program you just stored is now a softkey and can be executed just by pressing the relevant softkey.

So you can put your values onto the stack, and simply press the softkey, done!

(The 48 method is the same as the 49 and 50g method.)

RPN in this case is not used to describe the RPN entry method. ALL HP calculators (sorry, except for the algebraic ones which I keep forgetting about) use the RPN entry method (with the stack).

There was no name for the non-RPL programming so people just called it RPN programming.