WP-34S Rectangular/Polar (Suggested Change)

[orcinus]

Pardon me parachuting into a thread, but...

I never understood why complex value isn't always stored as P internally, with ->R and ->P only being different by a display flag (and input handling), in cases such as this.

In other words, is there a technical reason why both ->P and ->R don't assemble a polar vector internally from X: and Y: (taken literally, as polar, or calculated from rectangular coordinates, based on the key), then ->R sets a flag that triggers conversion to rectangular on display, while ->P does not?

Sure, doing all calculations in polar (internally) even when user wants them (and sees them) in R will accumulate an error, but isn't an error in the Nth decimal place of the mantissa better than a whole k*pi of error?