WP-34S: question - Initialization of local registers
#1

I could not find the answer to this in the manual:

As a program is running and functions allocate local registers, are those local registers guaranteed to be initialized to 0 when the LocR statement returns?

#2

Yes.

- Pauli

#3

Please see the last sentence on p. 175: "Newly allocated registers are cleared."

d:-)

#4

Walter, I honestly spent a fair amount of time searching through both the printed manual and electronically through the PDF before I posted the question. I figured it was a question that should be answered in the manual (I was searching for variations of "initialize" and apparently I missed this - the section heading did not really jump out at me as something relevant to this question).

There is a wealth of information in the manual and because you wrote it, you know where everything is, but sometimes it's just not that easy to find. In fact there have been times when I remember reading something and spend a long time searching for it and can't find it again.

I think what would be truly helpful is to append a procedurally generated permuted index to the manual. Something like Example permuted index

Permuted indexes are old school and out of fashion in this age of electronic searching. However, if the printed documentation is going to be the definitive manual then it really needs to have an effective way of finding information and there is nothing better for that than a permuted index. It is certainly not as much effort to generate as a complete hand generated index.

Edited: 7 July 2013, 2:14 a.m.

#5

Marcel, I put an additional sentence in on p. 102. So, when the 2nd edition is printed, it will be improved also in this matter.

Also I tried to find out what a "permuted index" is (your link doesn't work for me :-( ). Neither the English Wikipedia article nor the corresponding German one, however, succeeded in explaining. So please check your link - maybe that will do.

d:-)

#6

Walter

Simple 'delete' the pdf portion of the url and scroll through the docs index; the document ref is near the bottom.

SlideRule

#7

A permuted index takes a set of keywords and automatically indexes every occurrence of each keyword in the entire document. However, instead of just listing the keyword, it puts each occurrence of the keyword in context by listing the words before and after the keywords. It is somewhat related to KWIC indexes.

Here is a pretty good online example:

Erlang permuted index

The first word of the second column is the alphabetized keyword. Any part of the sentence before that keyword is in the first column and any words after they keyword are just listed after the keyword in the second column. The third column is the reference to the location in the document, in your case a page number.

There are variations of the format, but that is the general idea. The manual task is picking all the keywords, but you can do that by simply generating a list of all words used in the document and then deleting all the ones that don't seem appropriate. After that, there are various utilities that can generate a permuted index - although I can imagine that getting the page number reference right will be tricky.

Basically it facilitates manual searching in a way that is not that different than what people do when they are searching electronically. They jump from sentence to sentence that contains a particular keyword and decide from context whether they want to read more in that section or not.

Edited: 7 July 2013, 3:56 p.m.

#8

Too bad nobody can improve on it because the source isn't availiable...

TW

Edited: 7 July 2013, 4:10 p.m.

#9

Some might say the same about the source code for the 15C LE.....



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