Programming Pad for RPL Programs

[Raymond Del Tondo]

(05-21-2014 03:38 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  In a thread in another area of the forums earlier today there was brief discussion about ontaining HP Programming Pad pages for an HP-65. The upshot there, to me, was that several (many?) people still use program pad sheets to develop and document RPN code. (brief parenthetical note: this was a bit of a relief as I was fairly sure I was the only one that stll used these...)

Anyhow, has anyone created a custom programming pad layout for writing RPL programs, and if so, could you share a copy?

Building non-trivial RPL programs always takes lots of stack juggling, and a structured format would help the design, debug and documentation efforts.

I've made prototypes of simple pad layouts in the past using Excel, which basically are just matrices with lots of columns for the items on the stack, but I'd really like to see other folks ideas of how to do this.

Hi,

may I add my ideas related to programming aids?

All you need for structured RPL programming on a PC is a text editor which supports monospaced fonts, the HP RPL cmd line tools, Emu48, and some keyboard shortcuts;-)

There are several ways to "structure" a source text. I usually use tabs, or certain amounts of spaces for certain structures.

In this thread there are listings, partly with comments and stack diagrams.

You can see from the listings that multispaced fonts are not very suitable for text source listings.
In post #19 is a link to the ifft source in a zipped text file. This can be viewed best with monopaced fonts. Recommended editors are (in increasing flexibility): NotePad(++), UltraEdit, or my favourite: TSE Pro 32.

There are some IDEs which also help creating structured RPL code. Debug2x/Dbugx come to mind. 2x: Outdated and buggy as hell, but a step. One of the disadvantages of Debug2x was that the editor control they used always changed and reformatted my (the user's) source text without asking, which is a no-go.
I don't know if Debug4x (the extremely improved Debug2x, by Bill Graves) still has this issue,
but this was one of the reasons why I even made my few 49g projects using some custom scripts and the cmd line tools.