First Month with 50g

[Claudio L.]

(04-14-2015 06:57 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  I wonder what 50g owners are doing with their machines for professional purposes. I purchased one for a hobby (I never had seen RPL before) and a very few manual calculations (price calculations most of the time...) at work. When things become serious, most people would switch on Excel and myself on C++.

I used the 50g daily for structural engineering tedious and repetitive calculations (wind pressure determination, reinforce concrete beams design, etc), plus the daily number crunching, which in this profession is quite intensive (yes, we use structural software, but the input to the programs often needs to be pre-digested, converted to local coordinates, etc.).
Switch to Excel? Only when needed to produce a printed report, otherwise I get quicker answers with the 50g. Mainly because I use an evaluation engine I wrote many years ago (for whatever reason I never got to publish it), which is great help in engineering problems in general.
Basically it gives you alternative "STO", "PURGE" and "RCL" commands, which I called XLSTO, XLPG, and XLRCL respectively (because I wrote it to provide most of the Excel funcionality for the 50g).
Basically you start a problem in an empty directory. You store numbers and formulas using XLSTO, same as you would with STO. But when you store a formula, it internally stores the formula, its result, and creates a dependency tree, so when you store a number in one of the variables, the formula is automatically evaluated and the new result stored (same as in Excel when you change the value in a cell).
For example:
4 'X' XLSTO
3 'Y' XLSTO
'X+Y' 'Z' XLSTO --> This actually stores the result 7 in variable 'Z', and internally keeps the formula for auto-recalculation.
From now on, doing for example 5 'X' XLSTO will automatically update Z with the new result. Reading the variable Z gives the numeric result only.
XLPG works as PURGE, but it removes the result, the internal formula and the references in the dependency tree.
XLRCL will return the formula associated with a name (like Z above), while a normal RCL obtains the result.
It's basically an extension where each variable in a directory may contain both a result and a formula (like a cell in a spreadsheet).

With this, I can simply provide input values and obtain results very quickly from the VAR menu. It's definitely not "terribly inefficient", quite the contrary. By the time I browse in the PC to get to open a spreadsheet, I can be reading the results on the 50g.