Question. Basic with good math libraries

[Garth Wilson]

I got quite proficient at operating the HP-71 including its Math module and programming it in it user language. It was way, way beyond any BASIC I had seen previously. It made sense, I thought, that HP's Rocky Mountain BASIC (RMB), made to run on the big computers and taking 500KB+ (which was a lot of memory back then!), should be yet another big step up in everything good; so for a project at work in the late 1980's to control an automated production test setup, I got RMB 5.1, to run it on a 68000-based Viper board that went into a PC slot and had the IEEE-4888 connector on the back to go to our equipment. I was extremely disappointed. It was so clumsy and limiting, compared to the 71!

There was however HT BASIC which I seem to remember was TransEra's cloning of HP BASIC (RMB) for x86 PCs.

The 71 doesn't just use extensive libraries though. The vast wealth of native complex-number functions and so on in its Math module are written in assembly language for maximum performance, and they actually extend the language, including the functionality of basic operators; for example, if A and B are complex variables (or even if only one of them is complex), A*B yields a complex result, with no complaints. The FFT word FOUR could do a 1024-point complex fast Fourier transform in half the time it took the original IBM PC to do it in GWBASIC, even though the PC had the clock speed advantage by a factor of 7½ times.