Author Topic: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software  (Read 57700 times)

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Offline fhub

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #45 on: September 28, 2013, 10:36:42 am »
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« Last Edit: November 09, 2014, 08:04:41 am by fhub »

Offline fhub

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #46 on: September 28, 2013, 10:51:03 am »
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Offline timwessman

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #47 on: September 28, 2013, 12:37:40 pm »
Today's Bug: Doing a numerical expression of the form (1)2 in the CAS results in an error. The CAS does not handle implicit multiplication well.

Nope, using yak/bison does have limitations...

Quote
Today's Suggestion: I wish there was a | key in the Math palette, as I use that character in assumption statements a lot.

First row, 3 column. Not what you were looking for?

Now I'm absolutely disappointed about this HP-Prime (and its CAS), and I'll definitely stay with my good old TI-92+/Voyage 200 with its (modified) Derive CAS which is clearly better and more reliable than this 'hobby project' XCAS. ;)

Depending on what you are looking for, that is definitely a valid belief.

xcas is definitely a much more powerful and capable cas then what is on the nspire if you purely look at what it will integrate/calculate/do, but you are correct it lacks the polish and "user friendliness"* that ti has put into their system. (*provided you want the result like a student would expect) In many cases there are just assumptions about the input, and some funky unexpected syntax.

Judging from what many have said, there really have not been any improvements or capability enhancements since the derive time (nspire cas seems basically identical to the 89 machines).
« Last Edit: September 28, 2013, 12:44:45 pm by timwessman »
TW

Although I work for the HP calculator group, the comments and opinions I post here are my own.

Offline sailerboy

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #48 on: September 28, 2013, 01:12:58 pm »
I've got another question that may seem simple. How does one do Polynomial division?

For example, I entered (x^7+4x^3+8)/(x^2+2) in the cas mode, and it just rewrites it as a fraction. I tried using "simplify()", but that doesn't change it at all. To do division, I have to go to the on screen menu, select CAS, select Polynomial, Algebra, Quotient, and input the function, but even then, I get "Gen [int] Error: Bad Argument Type"
It seem that XCAS has no function implemented that does what you want, i.e. 'divide out' 2 polynomials (or a ratio of 2 polynomials).
Most other CAS have such a function (e.g. 'divout'), but you can define such a function yourself in the HP-Prime CAS:

divout(p):=quo(numer(p),denom(p))+rem(numer(p),denom(p))/denom(p)

Now if you enter divout((x^7+4x^3+8)/(x^2+2)) you get exactly what you want - an 'integer' part of the polynomial division and a 'remainder' part.

Franz


How do you define a function? I tried using f(a,b) := <function>, but it turned that into "table(a,b = <function>)"

Offline fhub

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #49 on: September 28, 2013, 01:38:53 pm »
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Offline sailerboy

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #50 on: September 28, 2013, 01:48:38 pm »
I'm using the Prime's OS that it came with. There hasn't been an update, has there?



EDIT: I tried redefining, and it seemed to work. Strange...
« Last Edit: September 28, 2013, 01:50:21 pm by sailerboy »

Offline SpiroH

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #51 on: September 28, 2013, 09:24:32 pm »
...
Better said: it WAS quite interesting, until I found out all these terrible issues and problems of the used XCAS! :(
Now I'm absolutely disappointed about this HP-Prime (and its CAS), and I'll definitely stay with my good old TI-92+/Voyage 200 with its (modified) Derive CAS which is clearly better and more reliable than this 'hobby project' XCAS. ;)
I can understand your point! Probably it's just nowadays life  and we're getting older... It seems it has become a 'de facto' behaviour from many IT companies, like MS, Apple, TI and so forth. It's up to the final customer to pay both the high item's price and also look for bug corrections (which is also very expensive indeed!). This is quite a cheap (although not very honest) way to improve a product without having to allocate extra resources and money.
Please be patient, we need your (HP) help over here. ;)

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #52 on: September 28, 2013, 10:53:37 pm »
because of a very bad forum reaction on your great kArmTI emulator).

Thankfully that has been resolved as soon as staff (the guys in blue and brown colors) were alerted about the issue (shortly after you left), otherwise staff were threatening bans for any future KarmTI bashing. One or more of them later tried to circumvent the ultimatum by downrating every post that praised the emulator, but he was probably caught a while ago because I haven't seen this happen in a long while.

I personally wish that you didn't leave just because of a few people out of many, although I can understand you considering it took a long while before the issue gets resolved (although I think at first there was confusion about the legality of KarmTI, which probably delayed the process, but harassment is even less legal anyway). After all, Omni is supposed to be a forum free of any hostility (it's even written on the front page, although you have to remember that admins are not slaves and have a life besides moderation) and this is partially why it reached record activity a few years ago. In fact, without Omni resurrection in 2008, the TI programming community would probably have been gone long ago.

Anyway back on topic, thankfully the HP Prime is much less buggy than the HP 39gII because I hardly saw reports about the calculator freezing completely after 30 seconds of use to the point where it required a firmware re-install. But yeah I was disappointed that many of the bugs went unresolved before the release, even though they affect maths. That said, however, it's not like TI and Casio calcs were always much better. The 83+, for example, had bugs that remained unresolved for almost 15 years, and TI has no staff that regularly monitors popular calc forums like Tim Wessman does with HP. Also add the fact that at least, the HP Prime is much less locked-down than the Nspire, has a much better BASIC language alternative (that can officially be programmed on-calc), a free emulator and much better specs (except RAM).
« Last Edit: September 28, 2013, 11:17:21 pm by DJ Omnimaga »

Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #53 on: September 29, 2013, 02:41:03 am »
Quote from: timwessman
Judging from what many have said, there really have not been any improvements or capability enhancements since the derive time (nspire cas seems basically identical to the 89 machines).
The Nspire series' CAS has seen marginal bugfixes (several bugs listed in Bhuvanesh Bhatt's file about the TI-68k CAS are no more) and improvements (the Nspire can compute all digits of e.g. 2^3000, while the TI-68k series is limited to 2*(2^2047-1)+1; IIRC, Taylor expansion was made faster; and of course, some functionality for the definition domain of a function).
The data structures and API haven't changed much, as shown by my 1:1 port of the core of an Aitken's delta^2 algorithm on an old Nspire OS version: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/437/43727.html . My Nspire port is non-interactive because we don't enjoy the same level of EStack integration as we do on the TI-68k series; I've never spent time reverse-engineering OS 3.1.0.392 to find all functions I need , and then using Excale's much more recent trick for pattern-matching ( http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=11927 ).
However, since OS 3.0.1.1753 in April 2011 (!), most of those improvements and bugfixes have been counterbalanced by genuine CAS bugs which neither the TI-68k series, nor the earlier Nspire OS versions, ever had. The set of bugs is different on every OS 3.x release.
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Offline SpiroH

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #54 on: September 30, 2013, 09:24:32 am »
Quote from: Lionel Debroux
And yeah, the DWIM principle (or at least, what looks like something along those lines) seem to produce many strange effects and racking up a few nerves on MoHPC and beyond.
As far as "user friendliness" is concerned, and this is definitely NOT a minor issue(!), the average student would expect the Prime to be, at least, something better and not worse than the nspire. So, in this particular respect, AFAICT, Prime seems to be a disappointment with its funky syntax (considering the main target are the students). They'll improve it, in the coming OS release, for sure, if they want to survive. :-\

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #55 on: September 30, 2013, 03:19:42 pm »
Yeah I agree. They can't afford to ignore bug reports or do what a different HP guy did on another forum and act as if they are false reports (after all, we bought the product, so HP should do an effort to track down bugs too rather than giving the entire homework to students.) Else, if they don't fix those useability quirks, they'll shoot themselves in the foot again and this calc will fail to gain a market share. TI and Casio can afford to screw their products up only because they already have a large market share, which HP currently lacks.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #56 on: October 02, 2013, 02:05:03 am »
Bug report for the emulator: When you hit CTRL+C to copy particularly large code (19 KB, for example) from the program editor to somewhere else (such as Notepad), the emulator crashes. This makes it impossible to distribute source code of large programs. This is the program in question, by the way (please do not redistribute on a CD/download archive/etc, in case I re-use it in a project. I would rather release the final product first if it comes to fruition. You can post the source here, though, since I might need it))
« Last Edit: October 02, 2013, 02:07:47 am by DJ Omnimaga »

Offline Adriweb

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #57 on: October 02, 2013, 03:06:39 pm »
Why would you do it like that, though, when you can see the variables through the ConnKit, in a much more user-friendly way ?
« Last Edit: October 02, 2013, 03:07:00 pm by adriweb »
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #58 on: October 02, 2013, 04:19:03 pm »
Because I can't get the connectivity kit to detect the emulator. I am using the TI-Planet version and on my computer, it looks different than in the screenshot:



By the way copying from emulator works fine with 9 KB programs. Some complex games will get particularly large, though.

EDIT Ok it seems that the TI-Planet download link was outdated. I got another copy from ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/calculators/Prime/ and it works fine now.
« Last Edit: October 02, 2013, 05:43:08 pm by DJ Omnimaga »

Offline Adriweb

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Re: Bugs and Requested Features with the HP Prime and Related Software
« Reply #59 on: October 02, 2013, 07:32:22 pm »
Ah, yeah, the hosted one has to be updated - but at least on my comp it asked if I wanted to update, so it's not too bad.

Anyway, I never had any issue with emulator detection :o
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