DM42 News

[Thomas Okken]

Assigning a letter to ENTER seems like a bad idea, because ENTER is used a lot in ALPHA mode. How do you type XEQ "FOO"? [XEQ] [ENTER] FOO [ENTER].

On the HP-41C, assigning a letter to ENTER was fine, because it has a dedicated ALPHA key; the 42S does not.

I think it would make more sense to assign no letter to ENTER, so you can exit ALPHA mode, and terminate commands with ALPHA arguments, with a single keystroke; and also assign no character to EXIT for the same reason, and instead use the arithmetic keys for letters, like the 41C. You want to save keystrokes in the most common scenarios first, and completing and aborting commands is surely more common than typing ÷ × - + in an ALPHA string.

Also, the key for typing a period should be the period key. :-)

I realize that there is the complicating factor that the HP-42S fully supports upper- *and* lowercase letters, unlike the 41C, and if you want to be able to type those easily, you won't be able to use the shifted letters for the arithmetic symbols etc. There seems to be no truly elegant solution, or at least I don't see it yet.