48-ish units for Prime?

[cvicisso]

Thanks Stephen,

I ran them both on my emulator (still waiting to pull the trigger on a 'real' Prime) and they are great! Nice job. They are... close(?) to what I'm looking for, but still obviously pretty far short of the 48/49/50's capabilities. Is there a way to allow either of those programs to use the stack? For example, crunch something that ends up on the stack and then allow the program to do the conversion on the bottom of the stack (without having to retype the result)? And then, return the result to the stack of course.

This is almost certainly a bridge too far, but ideally, I would like to use soft-keys to assign units to stack values, multiply/divide them via RPN, and then convert the result to the desired unit.

For example, on my 48gx (or 50g - after enabling flag 117 I think?), I could quickly determine how many Joules of energy were used to move something 55 cm using 23 ft-lbf (I know it's unlikely, but I intentionally mixed SI and Imperial units to help illustrate the point). By first putting 55 <units> <length> [cm] on the stack, then 23 <units> <force> [lbf], multiply, and then convert the product [1265 cm*lbf] to J via <units> <energy> <left-shift> [J]: 56.27 J.

I just did it and it took about 15 seconds using a mouse on my 50g emulator (would have been faster with an actual calculator). On any other calculator, it would require first converting things to the same system (SI, or meters and Newtons in this example), then 'knowing' the product of those two terms to be Joules. I like how the 48 series lets you convert unconventional units (like cm*lbf) to the 'proper' unit (J) without needing to do any preliminary conversions OR move away from the stack. In fact, I used this 'unit analysis' to check my work all the time in my undergrad studies. Saved me from [way too many !] stupid errors I would have probably never noticed otherwise.

Like I said, probably a bridge too far for the Prime. But if folks think it's possible to create such a program, man it would be awesome! I would definitely pay for that.