newRPL: [UPDATED April 27-2017] Firmware for testing available for download

[Claudio L.]

(10-16-2016 09:53 PM)LinusSch Wrote:  Having loved my 50g for almost ten years now, I feel pretty confident newRPL is set to become the closest thing there will ever be to my "perfect" calculator.

An idea for a neat feature for hexadecimal input: if the menu is {"A" "B" "C" "D" "E" "F"}, swapping it into the 2nd menu could reorder this into {"D" "E" "F" "A" "B" "C"} for consistency with the layout of the numbers.

There's no "menu" planned for hex input. You can just press Alpha and the letters and numbers, which is the same number of keystrokes as selecting a menu, then the number. However, newRPL (as the 50g) is fully configurable, so the user can always have convenience custom menus like the one you proposed here.
Right now there's no way for a menu item to know if it's in the second or first menu, which would be needed for the dynamic reordering you are thinking. I may have to add a command to return the current menu item pressed or something similar to achieve that.

(10-16-2016 09:53 PM)LinusSch Wrote:  I think I barely qualify as a beginner level programmer, but one of the languages I can make use of is C++. Point me to where I can help out! (but expect extremely slow progress)

Also, hi everybody. /Linus

First thing you need to do is clone the repository and read all the documentation in hpgcc3.org. Then setup your machine to compile the sources (there's a post above where I outlined the steps to do this).
Then try to read/understand some portions of the code and play with some modifications. For example other contributors implemented the % command to start, and in other case the MEM command, something simple to get familiar with the inner workings.
If you can make something simple work, then congratulations, you graduated as a newRPL dev and your contributions will be merged into the code as you send them.
Now if you prefer not to get into C, we have a lot of work to do in organizing the menus and help for each and every command. This is plain RPL code and text strings, very minimal C is required to do this.
Slow progress is OK, each can work at his own speed as long as we don't step on each other's toes. Coding speed is not a concern, we only care about (in this order):
1) Code correctness: Bug free and compiler warning/error free.
2) Code readability
3) Speed of execution
Items 2) and 3) may occasionally swap places on speed critical sections.