A skinnable phone/desktop 42S emulator (aside from Free42/Plus42)

[MickM]

(10-22-2023 05:40 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Suggesting that few or no people would notice the proposed E change is also disingenuous at worst, or naive at best, as when you're own testers encountered behavior they didn't expect, you noted that they immediately reported it as a bug.
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Asking for a change which you hypothesize 'should not bother' the >99% that use Free42 to make an incorrect key sequence more recoverable for the <1% that may use it is simply not reasonable.

I feel awkward belaboring this because it's readily apparent folks here appear to be clearly in Thomas' camp. I will however make the distinction that the above opinion arose out of discussions with many colleagues and their collective and unanimous conclusion was something like:
"Entering 1.2E34E5 to get 1.2E345? Maybe it's the way it works, but I've never knowingly done that and nor am I likely to ever do that. E inconsistently changes it's function on the fly - it does one thing the 1st time and nothing all subsequent times. In fact, the proposal fixes the issue at hand and makes the key's function both consistent and more useful. And no existing programs would be harmed by this change."
A devil's advocate might say I poisoned the well, although I don't think so because in all the conversations I've honestly forgotten exactly who came up with that solution.

That being said, now is apparently not the time to fight this battle. We can take the 42S constitution formed by our HP forefathers to task another day. At that time I would propose the 1st amendment. 1st amendments are good! It's those 2nd amendments where everything goes to crap ;-).

(10-22-2023 05:40 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Please don't take this as criticism, it is intended as feedback and guidance for how this community operates and what they expect.

No offense taken - it's a healthy and productive debate. My main takeaway in this thread is needing to conform to the principles of an open source community.

(10-22-2023 09:43 PM)Nigel (UK) Wrote:  Just a thought: I would personally expect 1.2pµ to enter 1.2E-18. This could be done without modifying “E” by having the p key (for example) execute the key presses ENTER E 12 +/- x. This would work even if the initial number was already in standard form. After all, why shouldn’t I be able to enter 4.2E3 nanometres if I want to?

We had already heavily discussed that, and similar options, and rejected them for reasons I'd be happy to elaborate upon in another thread if this skin sees the light of day. Other options also came up, but they all require Thomas to implement something new.

In light of my realizations in this illuminating thread, I reckon I have to figure out how to back-pedal my way out of Thomas's bad books - at this point I think he thinks I'm an arsehole... :-(.