10-24-2015, 06:02 PM (This post was last modified: 10-25-2015 10:19 PM by matthiaspaul.)
Post: #90
 matthiaspaul Senior Member Posts: 385 Joined: Jan 2015
(10-23-2015 10:04 PM)Helix Wrote:  Other remarks:
- EEX should show e instead of E, to be consistent with the symbol used in the stack.
Hm, then perhaps it would be better to change the symbol used in the stack to "E", as "e" is easily confused with the e number, and using uppercase letters for the decimal scientific notation is far more common than using lowercase letters.

Also, this could help to avoid potential confusion with an extension I am slowly (due to lack of time) working on for the WP 34s, and which, I think, would also be great to have in the Prime and newRPL:

Similar to the E notation denoting "*10^", there is an old informal convention to denote "*2^" using an uppercase "B" instead of the "E" (e.g. 1024 = 1.024E3 = 1.000B10 or 1000 = 1.000E3 = 0.9765625B10). Problem is that a lowercase "b" is also often used to denote a binary number.

(There's a newer standard convention to denote "*2^" using "P" (in C99 and IEEE 754-2008), but for length reasons it assumes the mantissa to be shown in hex, whereas "B" assumes decimal unless a different base is indicated specifically or known from context. Both, "B" and "P", assume the exponent to be shown in decimal unless otherwise noted. Using "P" instead of "B" would completely avoid any potential confusion with "b" for binary, but I'm not sure it would justify the violation of a standard by introducing a usage of "P" with decimal mantissas, even if such a usage may be obvious for a user from context.)

Anyway, for these reasons it might make sense to display an uppercase "E" for "*10^".

Greetings,

Matthias

--
"Programs are poems for computers."
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