Saturday, September 29, 2007

Allocate memory on the HP-35s or Zero is also a number to remember!

Found errors in my hp-35s programs due to the stupid way memory is managed on it, yea, yea, it's my fault, but still:

While not a bug I think the 35s indirect register handling is pretty ..... stupid ....

Say you want to store N numbers in register 0...N-1, god forbid some or your last numbers happens to be 0 (a perfectly okey number) AND register N,... hapens not to be allocated. You get an INVALID when trying to learn that number N-1 was 0!

What you must do is to allocate your N registers by putting a 'watermark' non zero in register N.

I do not mind allocating and deallocating memory, but this reality of hp-35s is: a) implication not well documented, b) error prone. What I think should been here is commands to allocate registers and to free registers!

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