WP 34S and 31S bugs and fixes

[Bit]

(12-23-2014 02:42 AM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  I know it is far to late to speak about this, because the documentation is already printed, the memory is full, and the product is on the market. But I have to.

One of my first experiences with the WP34S, playing around with it, not knowing anything about this calculator, was staring at this "2c64" cryptic numbers in the upper left display, which somehow had appeared by any keystroke, no chance to remember when it exactly happened, but the hell did not want to disappear again, even after Clx or switch off and on.
Now everybody knows what it means and knows how to get back to a "normal" display. But the first impression counts, and it was somehow negative. Obviously I was not the first, who was irritated about that, because in the manual I discovered at the very first pages for beginners the instruction to get rid of this. There must have been complaints about it.

IMO the wordsize and complement mode are not important enough, that they must be shown all the time. Also they will not be changed very often. And integer mode is already indicated by the letters right of the X number. And they are wasting the place to show the Y register in integer mode.

Wouldn't it be better, to leave the Y line clear and show wordsize and mode only when STATUS is invoked, like the HP-16C did? This would allow to show the Y-register in integer mode when YDON is active, and would avoid making 34S newbies nervous, like I was, when I was playing around before reading the manual, not knowing what was going on with this damned/wonderful calculator.

Bernhard

Changes have been made before and I'm sure further changes will happen if they're deemed justified. And the firmware memory isn't strictly full, it's only almost full.

Seeing 2c64 may be confusing but it'd be much more confusing if the calculator operated in integer mode but it wasn't very obviously signaled to the user that something was off. The right solution in my opinion is to explain very clearly at the very beginning of the documentation what's going on and how to return to normal mode. I gave some of these calculators to a few people and included a two page executive summary whose second paragraph mentions the RESET function and later on [f] [H.d] is pointed out as well, because first impressions matter indeed.

A case can definitely be made for allowing Y register display in integer mode, but in my opinion it'd only benefit advanced users who know what integer mode is, not beginners. I do think that word size and signed integer representation are important and as someone who actually uses integer mode, I wouldn't say they're only changed very rarely. The bigger problem is that there's no way to contract integers like you can reals with the exponent notation, therefore, especially when working in binary mode, you scroll using the [f] [<] and [g] [>] keys and the little bars in the upper right corner indicate which portion of the digits you see. With Y register display enabled, you wouldn't have that. Another problem is that I'm not sure how an integer Y register should be displayed in the limited space without exponent notation. Maybe it could be scrolled together with the X register?

I considered adding Y register display to integer modes when I created the current Y register display implementation but decided against it because of the above reasons. If someone can suggest a more or less reasonable way it should work, I don't mind implementing it.