newRPL - Updated to build 1510 [official build remains at 1487]

[Wes Loewer]

(08-09-2021 01:35 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  Yes, I can give you access to our bug tracker. PM me with a valid email address and I'll set it up if you want.

Okay, will do. The following aren't bugs but rather more design decision questions.

I was relieved to see that ADD and + are reversed for list processing. This was a longstanding shortcoming in the 50g and its ancestors. (For those unfamiliar with this issue, see https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp4...rvP3IHIdEJ from 10+ years ago.)
I wonder though if using a word like CONCAT might be better than ADD as it is more descriptive. Perhaps you could make CONCAT a synonym but keep ADD for historical reasons.

Another quirk of the 50g that I found annoying when programming was the behavior of the FOR and START loops in that they alway execute at least once, even when the condition would indicated that the loop should not be executed at all.

In other languages that I am familiar with (pascal, c/c++, java, hp ppl), something equivalent to

Code:

 FOR I FROM 5 TO 1 DO PRINT(I) END

would not print anything at all since the exit condition is already met before the loop begins. However, on the 50g, FOR loops are always executed at least once. So instead of something like

Code:

A B FOR I ... NEXT

you'd have to nest it within an IF statement.

Code:

IF A B <= THEN A B FOR I ... NEXT END

which always struck me as a bit of a kludge.

I noticed that newRPL reproduces this behavior. I can understand the pressure to do this to maintain compatibility, but I wondered since you were willing to break compatibility with ADD/+ for a good cause, then maybe you'd be willing to do the same with the FOR and START loops in order to be more logical and more consistent with other languages.

(Are there other languages that execute FOR loops at least once like this?)

Thoughts?