Question about HP71B Variable Names

[Valentin Albillo]

(01-17-2021 03:21 AM)Namir Wrote:  Is it possible at all to enhance programming the HP-71B by making it BASIC support longer variable names?

It would break havoc on so many things that it would need a very major rewrite of the whole system, in particular the parsing of BASIC statements and functions. For instance, how would the system be able to distinguish between what you meant when entering at the keyboard this piece of code

      FORK=ATOX            i.e., assign the value of variable "ATOX" to variable "FORK"

from this other meaning ?

      FORK=ATOX            i.e., initialize a FOR loop with index variable "K" going from the value of variable "A" to the value of variable "X"

Of course that's a quick example, there's a zillion others. Another concern is speed, the HP-71B is quite a slow beast (even back at the time, as compared to the HP-75C or the HP-85, say, about 5x slower) and having long variable names would greatly worsen the situation.

Decades ago, when I wrote HP-86/87 commercial programs for a living, I was happy at first that their version of BASIC allowed for long variable names, which the HP-85 didn't, but eventually decided to use the short letter-digit ones because using the long ones negatively affected the performance, as the code was interpreted, not compiled.

V.