Re: so why did hp display from the left? Message #11 Posted by Bill Wiese on 25 Feb 2003, 1:00 p.m., in response to message #1 by hugh
HP LED calculators defaulted to FIX 2 mode (meaning 0.00).
Dunno about HP11C/15C, etc but the HP41C/V/X calc defaulted to 0.0000.
With limited ROM space in the first HP calcs (35, etc.) the code required to do floating display, etc may have been regarded as superfluous - and may have included HP design engineer's sense of significant figures (why carry a given calc out to N places if lots of your data is only good to 2 or 3 places, for example).
Also, on an LED display calc, defaulting to FIX 2 also saves battery life over displaying in FIX 4.
[ An aside: If you've ever seen the library source code for the C function printf() you know that this is a fairly 'large' function compared to many others in libc, and the formatting code takes quite some space. In fact, on current C compilers targeted to small 8-bit embedded processors, there are sometimes several versions of the printf() function that can be linked to your code, with some having quite a few features removed (in many cases, floating point formatting) and consequently saving a few KB of ROM after linking. ]
Bill Wiese
San Jose, CA
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