tarom wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2017 8:54 am
Another part of the user manual that needs clarification would be "goose" under RefLCD in more detail section. At first, I did not understand what it was all about. A friend taught me "flying goose" of HP-41, which is hard to find if you search HP-42 documents only. Perhaps it is common knowledge for veterans, but it would be nice to be kind for novice users.
That's odd... I learned about the goose, including its name, from the HP-41C manual, but in the HTMLified version at
greendyk.nl, the goose is explained, but the word "goose" is never used.
A quick glance at the "Simple Programming" chapter of the HP-42S manual reveals no mention of the goose at all.
In Free42, the goose is implemented, but with a speed limit of 10 movements per second. The reason for the speed limit is efficiency: on the real HP-41C, flying the goose is accomplished by rotating the contents of the display, and on the 42S it is probably accomplished by updating two character positions; both versions require writing 12 bytes, which is a pretty cheap operation.
Free42, on the other hand, runs as an app in graphical desktop environments, where even a minor display update can consume hundreds or thousands of CPU cycles, and moving the goose on every LBL would dominate CPU usage, crowding out more useful activity (and accomplishing nothing except turning the display into a blur).
The situation with DM42 is somewhere in between, and I'm guessing goose throttling is useful there as well. This should be taken into account when documenting the goose and what it represents.
EDIT: Or am I mis-remembering about the goose being referred to as "goose" in the original HP-41C manual? Did I learn that term from HP Key Notes?
; would be interesting for ornithologists but isn't meant this way, I assume. 
