(Free42) tips & tricks: local flags

[Thomas Okken]

There are a few flags that really never need to be preserved because they are just status indicators, like 45 and 46 (solving, integrating), 49 (low battery), 53 (INPUT), and a few others as well. The remaining 96 or fewer flags that should be able to be saved and restored could then be split into two chunks of 48, which could be stored as a two-element vector containing two strings, or by using the X and Y registers simultaneously, or perhaps by having separate instructions for preserving the user flags and everything else, though then the 48/48 split wouldn't work. Hmm...

EDIT: 48 flags could also be stored in the mantissa of a binary floating-point number, so then the whole set could fit into a complex number, which would be LSTO-friendly and easy to split up for storage in numbered registers as well.

EDIT 2: Oh right, that's what Pauli just suggested.

(07-24-2020 07:10 AM)J-F Garnier Wrote:  So, Thomas, don't ever give up the binary version. Actually I'm missing it on the Android platform, but I'm not an Android fan and I'm still enjoying the old Pocket PC versions.

I have felt tempted to drop the binary version at times, but since building it requires next to no extra effort, I ended up keeping it anyway. But building it for Android and iOS, in a way that it can coexist with the decimal version or at least allow easy switching between the two, is a bit more difficult and I could never be bothered to sort that out. There doesn't appear to be much interest in it so I prefer to keep things simple there.