![]() No, I'm not referring to the fact that it is a blister pack: that we're already used to. ![]() That we live in penny-pinching times when it comes to mass produced goods is evident from the Spanish-language packaging of this HP-32SII that I just received. The only difference between this "silver bezel" version and the original HP-32SII is cosmetic: the colors of the metal bezel are more psychedelic, with the display surrounded by a silver rectangle. But a plain simple scientific calculator with RPN appears to be a thing of the past. Reverse Polish notation is not completely dead yet: it lives on in the form of the HP-12C and some not-yet discontinued graphing calculators with RPL programmability. Is it possible that I am holding the very last RPN calculator from Hewlett-Packard in my hands? I sure hope not, but with the recent discontinuation of the HP-32SII, for the first time in 30 years, Hewlett-Packard no longer sells a "reverse Polish" scientific calculator. This program is not as accurate as the one I wrote for the HP-32S, but it sure requires a lot less program space, even though I haven't even optimized it yet, making use of capabilities in the HP-32SII not present in the Russian models, such as register recall arithmetic. Make sure the calculator is in radians mode, otherwise the result will not be correct. To use the program, just enter the imaginary part, hit ENTER, enter the real part, and hit XEQ I. So here it is, a program that actually calculates the complex logarithm of the Gamma function for any complex argument. Since the B3-34 is an RPN calculator that works much like a typical HP machine, adapting the algorithm to the HP-32SII was a fairly trivial exercise. Just today, I received an e-mail from a fellow calculator enthusiast, who forwarded me some remarkable algorithms from one of the numerous Russian books dedicated to the most successful Russian programmable calculator, the B3-34. ![]() I've written an implementation of the complex Gamma function for the HP-32S, but rather than repeating it here, here's something new. So writing a Gamma function program, my favorite programming example, makes little sense. Like the HP-32S, the HP-32SII has a built-in extended factorial function that calculates the factorial for any real argument. It also has two shift keys, simplifying menus at the expense of a more cluttered keyboard. To the already impressive capabilities of the HP-32S, this machine adds fractions support, and support for algebraic expressions. This interesting (and, I should add, very good) calculator is an improved version of the HP-32S. It took nearly two months for BID.COM to deliver my order, but finally I have an HP-32SII in my hands.
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