HP Forum Archive 20

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HP Solve issue #26 is posted... Message #1 Posted by Richard J. Nelson on 2 Feb 2012, 6:12 p.m. Hello, Issue #26 of HP Solve has been posted at: [http://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/cache/580500-0-0-225-121.html] Issue # 26 Museum readers may be interested in the HHC 2011 report, the best speaker winner's paper, and other articles. X < > Y, Richard

Re: HP Solve issue #26 is posted... Message #2 Posted by Don Shepherd on 2 Feb 2012, 6:30 p.m., in response to message #1 by Richard J. Nelson Richard, the link for issue #26 looks like it downloads something for about 3 minutes (flashing modem lights), but I just end up with an empty .pdf file.

Re: HP Solve issue #26 is posted... Message #3 Posted by Paul Dale on 2 Feb 2012, 6:32 p.m., in response to message #1 by Richard J. Nelson Nice work as usual. A factual error on page 50. The WP 34S uses decimal arithmetic not binary. It doesn't use BCD because there are more efficient decimal packings methods available and we've the CPU power to use them effectively. - Pauli

Re: HP Solve issue #26 is posted... Message #4 Posted by Richard J. Nelson on 3 Feb 2012, 10:28 a.m., in response to message #3 by Paul Dale Thanks Pauli for the correction. It is a double mistake because i thought it used BCD. Now I need to review the differences. X < > Y, Richard

Re: HP Solve issue #26 is posted... Message #5 Posted by Paul Dale on 3 Feb 2012, 6:14 p.m., in response to message #4 by Richard J. Nelson Registers store floating point numbers in densely packed decimal format. We're not using the prefix encoding so we're not binary compatible with other such implementations -- not doing so avoids some large look up tables. Floating point numbers in registers are stored in decimal64 format, double precision numbers in decimal128. Statistical accumulations use both of these formats to avoid the large but similar numbers causing truncation problems (as mentioned in many HP calculator manuals). Internally, computations are performed in base-1000 carrying 39 digits and a huge exponent range. - Pauli

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