{"id":61,"date":"2006-11-28T15:02:44","date_gmt":"2006-11-28T15:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/2006\/11\/28\/off-topic-hp-50g\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T18:57:37","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T18:57:37","slug":"off-topic-hp-50g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/2006\/11\/28\/off-topic-hp-50g\/","title":{"rendered":"Off-topic HP 50G"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Finally, the exam period has ended.\u00a0Now I can return to normal life, reintegrate into the society and why not, write posts.\u00a0For those who did not know, I’m studying computer engineering at Universidade S\u00e3o Judas Tadeu<\/a>.\u00a0Despite my thirty-years-old, I’m still in the third year due to a hectic life that a programmer is suppose to have.\u00a0I’m sure many of you know exactly what I’m talking about.\u00a0I had to interrupt my course several times because of lack of money or overwork. Anyway, these past few weeks I was in a rush and I could not compose a decent post.\u00a0So, you will have to be glad for some funny facts about my new best friend, the HP 50G.<\/p>\n

I usually say that a programmer is not a name of a profession, but a name of a disease.”Programmer: A person who suffers for programming”. One of the symptoms that I find most decisive for a programmer their great ability to associate different things with programming, even involuntarily.\u00a0An example?\u00a0Easy!\u00a0When I was studying Industrial Informatics at ETE, there was a teacher who used to speak slowly, about 3 seconds among sentences.\u00a0He looked like an android.\u00a0I used to imagine that characteristic was due to the fact the teacher had little RAM, thus took a while to load a new sentence from the HD to be processed by the speech synthesizer.\u00a0At that time, we said if we had paid attention, we could see a blinking LED in his ear during those breaks. Fortunately, it could be easily solved if there had been a second thread to put the next phrase in RAM as the current phrase was used by the main thread.\u00a0I do not know what you think about it, but it seems disease\u00a0for me.\u00a0:-S<\/p>\n

Studying for Computational\u00a0Numerical Calculus tests\u00a0and armed with a HP 50G, it was inevitable to program it to automate some steps.\u00a0The exercises in this subject consist basically of arithmetic, but they are long and full of little rules. Baing a Programming\u00a0carrier since the age of 13, I have downloaded the manuals and got to work.\u00a0When an HP is bought, it comes with a “Quick Start” document having 120 pages; but don’t worry, you can download the complete PDF manual having 918 pages in Portuguese.<\/p>\n

As it might be expected, I’ve found many sites and tutorials on the subject, even several in Portuguese. The site\u00a0hpcalc.org<\/a> was a major contributor.\u00a0On the page about\u00a0programming<\/a> you can find a lot of things.\u00a0And the best thing, it’s all for free.<\/p>\n

We can program the HP either in UserRPL or SystemRPL.\u00a0Programming in SystemRPL gives us a performance gaining of almost 10 times higher than in UserRPL.\u00a0However, everything in life has a price.\u00a0The excerpt below was taken from one of the several PDFs I’ve found.<\/p>\n

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Strange!\u00a0I could swear I have already read something like that somewhere.<\/p>\n

Because I was unable to download a WinDbg\u00a0version to debug my HP, I decided to program in UserRPL anyway. The language is basically composed of a sequence of keys that were pressed during normal use of the calculator, but we can still use execution blocks, repeating loops (for\/while), conditional execution (if, else), sub-programs execution and many other things that I had no patience to read.\u00a0It’s funny to mix things like IF and ELSE commands that do array operations as if they were as simple as adding one to one.<\/p>\n

HP can be programmed on itself, I mean using its own keyboard.\u00a0But writing on that mini keyboard is similar to play Decathlon on Atari.\u00a0It works, but you know what will end up happening.\u00a0Another super uncomfortable\u00a0thing is trying to understand what is wrong in your program just looking at the source code (which is not indented) on a small LCD\u00a0screen.\u00a0One of the facilities is a USB cable that connects the HP to your PC.<\/p>\n

To access the stored\u00a0directories and variables in the calculator, you’ll have to download the software that makes this connection.\u00a0But if you have an x64 machine (even HP), there will not be drivers available to make this connection.\u00a0If this is your case, you can use a virtual machine that is running a 32-bit operating system.\u00a0Wow! That really works!<\/p>\n

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When connected, it displays a kind of “Explorer” where you can browse the folders and edit variables and programs.\u00a0With a double-click on the programs, an excellent development environment called “Notepad” opens with its program.\u00a0Don’t think of indenting your program. When the program is sent to HP, it takes its own indentation, which is not obviously the same as we would like to take.<\/p>\n

Well, at least it was interesting to learn more of this. It was really worth spending that money buying something I can program and be able to keep my addiction.\u00a0But it still does not stop there.\u00a0If you take a look at the quantity and variety of applications to download from hpcalc.org<\/a>, you will have an idea whatelse it can do besides calculating the matrix\u00a0determinant.\u00a0If you’re curious, you can download a calculating emulator on your PC and make a Test Drive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally, the exam period has ended.\u00a0Now I can return to normal life, reintegrate into the society and why not, write posts.\u00a0For those who did not know, I’m studying computer engineering at Universidade S\u00e3o Judas Tadeu.\u00a0Despite my thirty-years-old, I’m still in the third year due to a hectic life that a programmer is suppose to have.\u00a0I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62,"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/62"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driverentry.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}