ANS vs LAST-X

[Jim Yohe]

Sorry for the question but where did the ANS come from? I had to read the forums before I found a reference that the ANS key on my HP 30B is the same as the LAST-X key is on my HP 32SII.

While I'm on it, it appears that the ← key is doing double duty as the SHOW key does on the 32SII except that it's not a momentary view of all the digits like SHOW.

I suppose with further use (I'm had the 30B less than 24 hours) I'll see other changes to what use to be familiar to me. (Besides ENTER changing to INPUT) ;-)

[Mark Harman]

Jim,

ANS is that way to satisfy Algebraic and Chain mode users who are familiar with having an ANS key. ANS is familiar to TI users and it is the same as the LAST function on older scientific HP algebraic models. The majority of people who use this calculator will likely not use RPN. Quite a shame actually, as I converted from a Chain/Algebraic TI to this fine machine and now that I have learned RPN, I don't think I could ever use anything else.

Unfortunately, I am not sure what the &#8592 key is. I am guessing it is the backspace key. You hit it once to show full viewable precision of the result and you can hit it again as much as you want to truncate the result. I think this offers much better functionality than what SHOW does, which, as you mentioned, is momentary. Just hit the ON/CE key to get out of it - you won't lose your displayed number. If you want to keep the result, hit INPUT.

Regards,

Mark

Edited: 6 Nov 2010, 2:34 p.m.

[Jim Yohe]

Oh sorry. I thought when I pasted the backspace key (from MS Word) that it would show up as the left facing arrow and obviously didn't. lol

Thanks for the background. I've been a long time since I owned a TI calculator and didn't remember having ANS so couldn't directly relate to it (obviously).