HP-41Z module ready (at last)

[Ángel Martin]

You can stop holding your breath :) The module is ready and good to go to the daylight. I bet you thought it'll never be finished (I for one did!) but sure enough it's reached the "good enough" stage.

A quick recap of its highlights:

- a 4-level complex stack, complete for all the functions and routines.

- simplified/optimized complex displaying. It now uses the "RE+jIM" notation, more legible with real-life numbers (with EEX part)

- The displaying is nor rounded, but Integer numbers will display without trailing zeros in the decimal part. So you quickly tell if it's integer or not (and saves real state in the display).

- common factor is extracted when Re(z)=Im(z), and not zero - somehow I found slightly misleading the line "0(1+j)"

- 8k module, holding more than 120 complex math and complex stack functions, plus about 20 more buffer-related functions, 98% of them in MCODE

- programmable promptimg memory functions - with IND addressing support in run time

Already submitted to TOS, should hopefully be ready for download in a few days time.

Thanks to those who provided suggestions and actual coding, real MCODE programmers out there. Peter, Eric, Egan, Howard... In particular Doug Wilder for his implementation of the programable prompting routine, and Håkan Thörngren for his coaching on the buffer implementation. It would have taken them just a fraction of the time it took me to put it together had they wanted to!

Best,
AM

Edited: 20 Sept 2009, 4:05 a.m.

[Egan Ford]

Thanks. I look forward to using it.

[Howard Owen]

Congratulations on implementing all those improvements! I'm sure the programming wasn't a trivial exercise. I'd like to differ with you on one point however. I almost certainly couldn't have implemented those ideas in mcode anywhere near as fast as you could. The only mcode program I ever wrote was a simple initializer for Hepax memory. Stack and buffer manipulation like you achieved would have taken me a long, long time to write.

Congratulations again!

Regards,
Howard

[Eric Smith]

I've found that writing microcode for HPs goes much more quickly when I've got a simulator that lets me single-step through it, set breakpoints, etc. Otherwise debugging is extremely tedious.

I have no idea whether Ángel Martin uses such a thing, though.

[Ángel Martin]

I wish! Is there one available? That'll sure make my day... you're right it's tedious, but also painful and sooo easy to make mistakes. Yet it's as addictive as any programming language can be, maybe even mode.

[Raymond Del Tondo]

Of course there are simulators with built-in debuggers.

One of them is part of SDK41 from Warren Furlow,

and the other is part of Emu41 from J.-F. Garnier;-)

HTH

Raymond

[PeterP]

Angel, now I'm even more impressed! You did all of your fabulous MCODEing without Warrens m41? It is a most wonderful tool that allows single stepping of MCODE and many more easy features. I've had to learn how to use it myself and wrote a little expanded manual for it with examples etc which you can find at TOS as well.

Cheers

Peter

[Ángel Martin]

Currently posted & available for download. Feedback is appreciated... hope you enjoy it.

Edited: 24 Sept 2009, 9:26 a.m.