WP-34S Rectangular/Polar (Suggested Change)

[Marcus von Cube]

(04-06-2014 08:01 PM)orcinus Wrote:  I never understood why complex value isn't always stored as P internally, with ->R and ->P only being different by a display flag (and input handling), in cases such as this.

Just to add a few facts to the answer Barry gave: We've run out out of resources on the hardware from the beginning. 2 KB of battery backed RAM (+ 4KB of scratch RAM) and 128 KB of flash isn't a whole bunch of memory to operate on. So everything is essentially at fixed addresses (or shuffled around when the configuration changes). We do not have objects which carry meta information about their nature. We just have a single array of registers (including the stack). What's in a register is solely determined by the mode the calculator is in (single/double precision, integer) and the command(s) operating on the data.

The 43S will be a different beast, though. :-)