41: What's the significance of the alpha mark (ᵀ) prefix on catalog 2 entries?

[hth]

(01-23-2020 03:55 PM)Ángel Martin Wrote:  

(01-23-2020 08:09 AM)hth Wrote:  Also COPY does not take it argument from Alpha, you are expected to press XEQ "COPY" [Alpha] name [Alpha].
COPY is just different from the rest.

100% agreement - boy have I often wondered why force the user to press the first ALPHA if *only* ALPHA entry is allowed....

I think this is related to did not have time, not enough ROM space and being consistent. They had to stop somewhere. An instruction like XEQ accepts both numeric and Alpha input. On the other hand ASN, COPY, CLP take only alpha, sometimes empty input is allowed. In some way it makes it more consistent (you always press Alpha to mark start and end of text input) and probably easier to implement.

But I agree, I always found it annoying. However, when I have recently created ASN' which is like ASN but also with numeric input, suddenly it turned into a good thing.