🚀 go-pugleaf

I thoroughly enjoyed your comparison of HP calculators - it was a
lot of work!

> BINARY
> The 42S actually feels the best for interactive bit operations, but
> its wordsize is fixed at 36 bits.

We chose 36 bits because it is divisible by both 3 and 4.  Thus it
works out nicely for hex as well as octal.  We couldn't afford to
implement 64-bit binary operations/display (ROM constraints) and felt
36 bits was a reasonable compromise.

> COMPLEX
> The 42S is the best of the pack, however, as it is the first to display
> complex numbers in polar as well as rectangular coordinates.  ...
> The 42S particularly is a great complex arithmetic machine ...

> MATRIX
> The 42S is the winner again for incorporating matricies smoothly with
> other types of numbers and overloading the operators ... The 28S does
> pretty good as well, but it is not near as slick as the 42S.

> MENUS
> The 42S is an improvement on the 28S with it automatically popping
> back out of a menu after you have used it, but menus still are slow to
> use.

> STATS
> The 42S has done the best job of generalized curve fitting, with its
> BEST fit function.

Not bad for *half* the ROM !!!!!!!

Pam "I couldn't resist - I worked on the 42" Raby
pam@hp-pcd