Re: New "unknown" HP-71B command discovered. Message #2 Posted by Ex-PPC member on 9 May 2001, 2:23 p.m., in response to message #1 by Reinhard Hawel
Your message being dated April 1st, it's blatantly obvious
it's intended as an "April's Fool" joke.
Anyway, for those people who didn't realize that, and are
puzzled by your "MEMORY" command, let's explain what's
happening: MEMORY is being interpreted by the BASIC line
interpreter as "MEM OR Y".
BASIC looks for a real MEMORY statement. It finds none,
then parses the line. MEM is recognized as a valid numeric
function who returns the amount of available memory. Then,
OR is recognized as a valid boolean operator, and after
that, Y is recognized as a legal variable.
So, the complete MEM OR Y is a perfectly legal expression,
if weird. Of course, MEMORY0 to MEMORY9 are interpreted
likewise, just using variables Y0 to Y9 instead of plain Y.
I saw this old joke many years ago, in a book by Joseph K.
Horn titled something like "Get the most from your HP-71B"
or so.
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