Buyers remorse of HP 48

[Dave Britten]

Keep in mind that the 35S is not an especially great choice for computer science. When entering numbers in bases other than decimal, you always have to add a base suffix (b, h, o), even if the calculator is set to a non-decimal base. That makes it worse than the 48S/G in my opinion, where at least it's a consistent # prefix for integers in any base.

If you're willing to sacrifice RPN (and that's a very big 'if', I realize), then the Casio fx-5800P is worth looking at. The Base-n mode handles 32-bit integers in either signed (2's complement) or unsigned modes, with binary numbers displayed as two lines of 16 characters for easy reading with no scrolling. You have unshifted access to the four bases, and it has all the usual logical operators. It does not have shift/rotate/mask operations, but these could be programmed. Plus it does all the other things you'd expect of a good scientific calculator: matrices, complex numbers, 2-variable stats and regressions, and so on.

I find it very nice for programming scientific calculations, as it has a special variation of the input command ('?' on a Casio) which prompts you with the existing value of the variable, and you can simply hit EXE to reuse the current value. It's kind of like the INPUT command on a 32S or 42S. Very handy when you have a program that requires several inputs, and you want to run it a few times with slightly different values.