List Commands Library for 50g

[pier4r]

My 2 eurocents:

User point of view: there can be tons of useful programs, for example scattered on this forum. The problem is that when they are scattered, the user has to search them, type them, evaluate them and that's a lot of overhead if the user wants to solve a problem in one session run. At the end he can end doing its own version of the solution.

This is a general problem about information. If the information that I need is somewhere but it is hard to reach given the time that I allocate to the problem I want to solve, often I end up trying to derive the information by myself with possible poor results.

Therefore I highly value libraries that centralize useful solutions. For example already someone (even me) that goes through this forum, comp.sys.hp48, hpcalc.org and other sources (which ones? I do know only MoHPC and comp.sys.hp48 as big sources for RPL programs) and assembles a library of useful programs because those either save programming time or execution time (size comes third), is doing a very useful work in my opinion. Like a "librarian" that offers the next person a selection of useful books.

Therefore for me what is important is the utility function first.

Take the LPICK example.

Does it save developing time for equivalent LPICK routine? Yes
Does it save time searching (and evaluating) for an equivalent LPICK routing written by someone else (ex: David Hayden) that may require hours (or days) due to absent centralized properly ordered repositories? (hpcalc is great, but still one needs to go through the entries) ? Yes
Does it perform well against the "locally" know alternatives? Yes
Does it take a lot of space? A mere 300 bytes for a library that can grow up to 128KB (as far as I know)
Can be often used? For someone that went through the effort to search a library for its needs, yes.

End decision: is it worth being in the library? Yes.

What about that program consisting of 3 cleverly arranged built in commands in userRPL, is it worth being in a library instead of being manually typed? If it satisfies the points above: yes.