CASIO fx-4000P scientific calculator from 1986

[ijabbott]

(08-29-2022 02:34 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  

(08-29-2022 09:40 AM)ijabbott Wrote:  Does it bug people that about half the available programming steps for this calculator (and others that use the same programming model) are wasted on entering colons? The older series terminating with the somewhat unobtainable FX-603P were far more efficient.

That's one of the perils of an expression-based language with a parser, vs. a keystroke "language". Saying half the steps are spent on colons would be a great overestimate, though, unless nearly all of your program lines are only one or two bytes. You wouldn't have a very useful program that way!

OK, it's probably more like 20% colons for a real program. The "?→A:" sequence to prompt for input and store in memory location 'A') also bugs me because it takes 4 steps, and ? must be followed by → (except in an alpha string). If they had an "Input" instruction, the sequence could be reduced to 3 steps - "Input A:".

On the plus side, implicit multiplication saves a few steps!

Quote:If you want to see wasteful memory usage, take a look at the Sharp EL-5120. There's 32 bytes of overhead for each program header, then 3 bytes per program line, and 8 bytes for each local variable defined for that program. The HP 32S is no saint either, with 1.5 bytes for each program step, and something like 9 bytes for most numeric constants within a program.

Whereas on the Casio, each character that makes up a numeric constant counts as a step, so the 32S wins for any positive number requiring more than 6 characters to specify.