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Question. Basic with good math libraries
03-13-2018, 08:34 AM
Post: #1
Question. Basic with good math libraries
I am following the thread about a 71B repair http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-10300.html that looks like a detective work and I like it.

The thread was also the cause that I looked about the 71B capabilities a bit more. All the other threads so far, even the 71B compendium (n1), were not enough to interest me. One can say that a "door" on a concept can be found in the least probable places.

Anyway reflecting upon the little knowledge that I have, it seems that around the 1980 a series of calculators with basic as main programming language were created by several brands. I remember an article of Valentin Albillo were he shows that a sharp pc-1211 is quite a contender for the hp41. That sharp used basic.

Now those dialect of basic had also good math capabilities. The 71B (and the 75 series) was also a calculator and the library of math functions looks large, with the Math ROM plus other ROMs (see the 71B compendium).

What I notice though is that, aside from emulators, nowadays there is no actively developed open source basic (n2) that has a strong math library readily available as the math libraries in the 71B or other basic calculators of the 80-90 . At least for what I know.

Am I mistaken? Can you point out any basic that is equipped with a math library like the 71B ?

Then another question, in the other way. Those implementation of basic, like the one for the 71B, were also ported for other architectures? Like x86? Is there a chance that were open sourced?

n1: http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-5286.htmlm that is linked in wikipedia, thanks Sylvain, Joe, Matthiaspaul and all the others contributing in that marvelous work. Also I saw that it was updated again, as some pieces were unreachable when I crawled them. I have to crawl it again and pack it in the hp calc torrent.

n2: Thus no visual basic .net or closed source implementations. Otherwise blitzmax would be great enough. But those closed source environments may "die" or be usable only with emulators or virtual machines/environments.
Also decimal basic, recently discussed, http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008683/english/ , looks promising but (a) the list of math routines are not that much, the 50g has more, although combining them may be enough, (b) I do not see it is open source and (c) I am not sure whether it is actively developed.

Wikis are great, Contribute :)
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Question. Basic with good math libraries - pier4r - 03-13-2018 08:34 AM



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