HP-85 A.K.A Capricorn

[Steve Simpkin]

(05-28-2018 09:50 PM)Dieter Wrote:  

(05-28-2018 06:45 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  What do you mean by that ? It had the usual mathematical functions found in most other popular BASIC implementations, give or take a couple.

Hmmm... let's go back to early 1980s. What were the popular BASIC implementations back then? Apple Integer and Applesoft BASIC, TRS80 BASIC, or the versions for the various Commodore 2000...8000 series computers. Any other popular dialects? Maybe Microsoft BASIC?

Then take a look at the mathematical functions of these BASICs. What you get is essentially a square root, exp and natural log, power, sin/cos/tan, abs, int and maybe sgn, and atn as the only inverse trig function. And all this with radians as the only available angle unit.

In contrast, the HP85 featured three angle modes, a complete set of inverse trig functions (asn, acs, even two atn functions), sec, csc, cot, ceil, floor, ip and fp, natural and base-10 logs, remainder, and more. And all this in 12-digit BCD precision over a domain that is even larger than today's 52-bit double-precision.

So it looks like, at least for numeric applications, compared with the common BASIC dialects of the time the HP85 was far superior. But of course I don't know all BASICs that were around in the early 80s. Which ones, would you say, had a comparable set of mathematical functions?

Dieter

My first exposure to the BASIC language was using a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I with a 4K Level I Basic installed in 1977. This single-precision floating point version of Basic only directly supported four math operators (+,-,x,/). As the language lacked many common math functions, the (well written) user's manual provided subroutine listings for square root, exponentiation, exponentials, logarithms, arithmetic sign, and trigonometry functions.

My first computer, a 1978 Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P, had an 8K BASIC written by Microsoft. While it did have a fairly complete set of floating point math functions, it was limited to 6-1/2 digits of precision.

The moral to this tale is that not all BASIC's were created equal.