Modular programming?

[mgmander]

Apologies for the newbie question. I've had the original Prime since almost day one of its availability. There were a number of initial reasons it never got much use, with the main one being very hard to see key labels (light blue on grey), and secondly, the lack of integration of its RPN stack with programs. There were other reasons, but those were the two main ones.

Recently, I almost ordered a Prime G2, mainly to get the new higher-contrast keyboard, and to give it another go since the Prime is, after all, a very capable and impressive machine overall. In anticipation, I sat down with the old Prime again to refresh my memory and figure what I could do with the programming, grudgingly ignoring the lack of stack manipulation capability. I decided I would create a few new "Apps" in order to try and organize program modules into logical groups and avoid cluttering up the program list menu. Much to my surprise, it seems that programs created are not local to an app at all, rather they are all global and visible the same way in the program menu for each App?

I learned programming with Modula-2 back in the day (mid 80's) and that has influenced me to thus always structure my software in very logical, organized blocks of routines, with each module throughly debugged and documented before integrating with others. My HP-50G allowed for a very structured approach, with its directories (which I know were "fake" and simulated but still very helpful) and the ability to essentially hide utility routines by manually organizing directories in such a way so that completed and fully debugged modules are further pages away from the first directory screen, and thus not distracting and in the way, so to speak. Not sure if I described that very well but hopefully you get the idea of what I meant?

A simple question then: is something even remotely like that possible for the Prime? I know there are no directories, real or simulated, but is there no way to group globally accessible utility functions into an App, for example, so that they do not clutter up the program menu everywhere? If I recall, it is possible to somehow compile or package an app on the Prime (not that I've explored that yet, and I may be wrong) and if one does that, are the functions then somehow hidden, yet still accessible to normal global programs, as long as they are exported of course, similar to built-in functions? If so, then I definitely need to look into that feature!

Also, I presume there is actually no way of manually sorting the list of programs, and the only options are chronologically or alphabetically? The only way I can see having control over program module positions in the list is to sort them alphabetically and name the utility routine modules starting with a 'Z' for example, to force them to the end of the list of programs. I suppose that might suffice for my needs, if there is no other way.

I do appreciate any hints or pointers to other threads where this might have been discussed. If anyone feels that a simple thread search should turn up the info I need, or that I should RTFM, then please feel free to say that; I won't take any offence. I honestly did not spend a ton of time looking through this forum, nor the documentation and tutorials thread and the main reason for that is that I somehow expect to be disappointed that what I am seeking to do is simply not possible, so the answer might be a swift "no" to my query!