Question about HP71B Variable Names

[Garth Wilson]

(01-19-2021 06:57 PM)Gene Wrote:  Speed comparisons from Joe Horn in the PPC Computer Journal using some common BASIC benchmarks. Attached is the PDF - Valentin, let's see if you can read this. :-)

It's somewhat interesting, but the speed will be affected a lot by the FOR...NEXT's which we already knew are slow, and line-number searching, but the benchmarks don't do the trig, log, and matrix operations which is where I think the 71 would shine. My longest-running project ran the 71 for weeks to calculate large tables for math functions and produce 6MB of Intel Hex files, but I suspect that a major thing slowing it down was all the text and occurrences of HTD and DTH$.

(01-19-2021 06:58 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  It seems they needed the ROM space for the useless abomination called "CALC mode", as some über-imbecile people decided it would bring more sales appeal than having much faster program execution.

Hey, J-F, come to it, why don't you edit CALC mode out of the System ROMs and use the recovered ROM space (5 Kb) to provide instead the super-useful keywords in the STRINGLX file and some other worthy LEX files, as you did with the enhanced Math ROM ?

The resulting 1CDDD (say) System ROMs could then be available as part of your Ultimate ROM and/or the MultiMod. A dream come true !

I agree. I was never able to develop any liking for that CALC mode. It's pretty worthless to me.