HP Prime - worthy successor to HP-71B ?

[rprosperi]

(01-13-2024 08:15 PM)John Keith Wrote:  

(01-13-2024 02:42 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  The latest 50g ROM, when last updated (2.15 IIRC), had less than 10 bytes of available space, so adding any enhancements would mean major refactoring before even starting on the new features. And both Tim and Cyrille have commented that mods to the 50g ROM were extremely difficult as it's highly patched state is very frail and nearly any change led to other undesirable side-effects, etc. So, many man-years of effort by folks with System-RPL and likely both Saturn and ARM assembler experience would be needed. Not impossible, but also not cheap.

This is why my preference for a "modernized" HP 4X would be NewRPL or DB48X running on modern hardware, along with an emulator similar to EMU48 that can use ROM 2.15 to allow the use of "legacy" programs and libraries that contain SysRPL or assembly code.

I'd prefer a complete re-write for a new product too, but I won't expect one...

And I'm likely in the minority, but I believe any theoretical successor should be fully backward compatible with 50g RPL out of the box, possibly allowing some very specific behavior changes via flags.

Note that I'm not looking for a religious discussion here about why this view is so evil and indefensible that it defies all human logic, it's simply what I think makes the most sense, so use of it can leverage the huge base of existing apps and code, rather than enable an infinite number of discussions about why the new this or that was changed when the old way worked just fine (see HP Prime for an example). But it won't happen, so I suppose there is nothing to fear....