HP 48GX Collector’s Edition (merged) - please don't start two threads

[c3d]

Thanks a lot for all the answers and insightful comments. I will try to keep that discussion in mind during development.

In the meantime, I have been busy working on a major stepping stone in the DB48X development path, which is somewhat relevant to this discussion. As you may be aware, I was quickly reaching the limits of the DM42, currently using 99.2% of the available program space. It was clear I would fall short of parity with even the HP48SX, unless I took some drastic measure.

Today, I released v0.5.2 and 0.6.0 simultaneously. They are practically identical from a functional point of view, but 0.5.2 is the last one to use the Intel Decimal floating-point library (which consumes about 60% of its code space), while 0.6.0 is the first one to replace it with a brand new, space-efficient decimal implementation. The resulting gain in code size is dramatic (from 711228 bytes down to 409252 bytes). Additionally, the new code was designed from scratch to support variable size precision, so you can compute sqrt(2) with 2000 decimals in a few seconds. There is a hard limit to 9999 digits, but in practice, you will normally stop long before that because computations take otherwise forever (1.0 / 3.0 takes about 5 seconds at 9999 digits).

This is relevant to the current discussion for the following reason: now both newRPL and DB48X feature variable-precision decimal computations. Any precision above 12 digits is not something that can be achieved with the original HP48 code base. Whether you value that or not really depends on how you use a calculator. I know that to me, personally, both the 12-digit decimal and 64-bit binary limits of the HP48 are annoying.