Question for RPN hp calculators lovers.
I just wrote this up before you posted ...
So last night when the forum was down I was on Discord and Zucca was wondering why his hp 42S was displaying what seemed to him to be a wrong number of digits after the radix. I have the original manual but it doesn't really explain this very well.
For example, he set the display to ENG 03. He then recalled pi and was presented with
3.124E0I believe he then multiplied by 10 and viewed this
31.42E0He was not sure why it didn't display three decimal places like this
31.416E0^^^ that is what it displays when I set it to ENG 04 (it rounds the last digit up from 5 to 6).
Well, it is operating exactly as it should. I also have a newer hp 35s which operates exactly the same way.
If you set the display to FIX 03, it will FIX the decimal places to always show 3. But that isn't how ENG and SCI mode works. What does this mean then: ENG 03? It means it will display 3 digits
after the first digit.
It does not mean three decimal places.
You can read the manual for the excellent Free42 PC application which works just like the real calculator (one of which I own) -
2.6.4 The ENG function
The ENG function puts the calculator in engineering notation. It looks like scientific notation but now
the first number does not need to be between 0 and 1 but can be between 0 and 1000 and the power
will be always 3 manifold (corresponding to the magnitude prefixes such as milli-, micro-, kilo-,
mega-, etc. used in engineering units). For example: 100 will be represented by 100.E0 in ENG 2
mode while 1000 will be 1.00E3 in the same mode. Why do we get 100.E0 for 100 instead of
100.00E2 in ENG 2 mode? Because the calculator shows in engineering mode the same number of
digits it shows in scientific mode.
https://thomasokken.com/free42/doc/42s.pdf
Corrected: The question was from Zucca Not Neomys Sapiens