[VA] SRC#005- April, 1st Mean Minichallenge

[Valentin Albillo]

.
Hi, Maximilian:

(04-07-2019 12:45 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Like Albert I had never heard of this before. Instead I falsely assumed that your April fool's challenge was based on arbitrarily assigning discrete indices to different ways of calculating means and then somehow interpolating between them.

Hehe, no, my "April Fool" minichallenges are intended to seem weird and/or impossible but they're never arbitrary or fake, they're solvable in a deterministic way with nothing arbitrary to them (see the archives for some others, like my "SSMC-20-April 1st 2008 Spring Special", for instance).

Quote:I asked Wikipedia about it and found out that in Germany it is actually called the "Hölder-Mittel" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6lder-Mittel) of which I had never heard before either. A strange kind of April First sidenote is that it is also known as "Potenzmittel". Now this is a German word which also has a completely different meaning that one usually associates with male-specific medication, the most prominent brand name being "Viagra".

How unexpected (and fun!) ! Seems that both of us learned new things ! What an unexpected connection ! ... (and in German no less)

Quote:This is my 39Gii version of Valentin's program above. [...]. What were these guys drinking when they designed this interface ?) As a genearal note, lots and lots of alternating "Alpha" and "Shift" pressing is necessary to program this calculator. A major, major, super major nuisance!

Thanks a lot for your code, I find it perfectly understandable but unnecessarily complicated in the little details when compared to plain simple HP-71B BASIC.

I don't understand why HP kept and still keeps inventing new programming languages particularized for this or that new calc when they already had the very best, most powerful ones. In the case of (HP71B-like) BASIC, a few extensions here and there (i.e.: additional keywords and polls) would accommodate any new capabilities (such as graphics, lists, etc.), the same way HP did with the (71B) Math ROM, which added new data types (COMPLEX, COMPLEX SHORT) to the existing ones (INTEGER, SHORT, REAL) and extended/added the necessary capabilities to handle them.

As for your "What were these guys drinking [...] ?" I've found myself thinking the same about some of the stupid decisions they made for the HP-71B and its Math ROM, so nothing new there, it happens with many models.

Quote:The "GMEAN" program itself - not optimised in any way - reads like this,
[...]
L-2 -> K; (Note: the "->" is in reality a black arrow that can be entered by menu command "STO" only)
[...]
IF K != 0 THEN (Note: Do not type "!=" here even if the manual says so. Use the crossed-out equal sign accessible only from some menu-submenu instead. This took me almost an hour to find out and fix...)
[...]
FOR I FROM 1 TO N DO (Note: Do insert all blank spaces manually here, using Alpha and the "+" key. The smart menu that creates the control expressions unsfortunately does not instert blank spaces around them which even more unfortunately are required for the program to work. My Sinclair ZX81 from 1981 did a lot better in that respect.)

Your comments (highlighted in dark red above) are hilarious, if sad. I guess there was little regard for usability tests when they designed the interface, else they'd have notice the many inconveniences and plain annoyances. Perhaps too strict deadlines or too few people assigned to do the checking. Anyway, if buyers can be (and actually are) used as beta testers for functionality, they may be for usability as well,

Quote:I have to insert a photo here because, as already written, my Macintosh and the Hp-39GII did not become intimate friends):

Nice pics, thanks for including them but I'd like to ask you a favour: could you please edit your post to replace those large pictures with smaller versions ? The large size ruins the format of the PDF I intend to create with this thread, as I usually do. Thanks in advance ! ...

Best regards.
V.
.