Re: How To?
Message #2 Posted by Reinhard Hawel on 3 Feb 2000, 4:57 p.m.,
in response to message #1 by Bill Eaton
You're welcome to ask here, but this site concentrates on the older calculators.
You might find more help about these themes on http://www.hpcalc.org/ There's a lot of other resourcs too on the net.
Anyway, I repeat, you're welcome to ask here, if there are some troubles.
Now to your question: Assembly language is a means of low-level programming (on every computer). In fact the low-level routines of the calculator itself are written in assembly language.
The calculation routines are a mix of assembly language and "system RPL" (This is a superset of the language you've obviously learned already - the HP48 "normal" programming language).
When programming in assembler (somtimes inexacly named "machine language") you have a limited number of registers with different capabilities. You try to manipulate these registers with primitives (+, - and, or, ...). you have the possibility to call the machines internal routines, which normally brings a huge speed enhancement.
On the other side you have direct access to all the internals of your HP.
I'd say programming the same task in assembler and RPL could bring a speed difference of 10:1 - 100:1
There are some development systems on hpcalc.org . Explaining the whole process will be way above the purpose of this forum and there has everything already been written by somebody.
Feel free to ask on this forum or via email, when there are more questions.
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