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Installation procedure

ALG48 is a regular auto-attaching library (library number 909). To install it on your HP48 download the file alg48.lib onto your calculator (in binary mode), put the content of the created variable on the stack, store it in the port of your choice (e.g., 'ALG48.LIB' DUP RCL SWAP PURGE 0 STO), and power-cycle the calculator.

The basic operation commands defined in ALG48 (AADD, ASUB, ANEG, AMUL, ADIV, AINV, APOW, see Section 4) are intended to be assigned to the corresponding keys (+ - +/- * / 1/x ^ ) of the calculator. To do this you can type:

{S APOW 45.1 AINV 46.1 ANEG 52.1 ADIV 65.1 AMUL 75.1 ASUB 85.1 AADD 95.1} STOKEYS

Thereafter, whenever the calculator is in user mode, pressing one of these keys will call the corresponding ALG48 command, and, if the arguments provided do not match those handled by the library (see the Command Reference in appendix) the standard command will be called. Therefore you can stay in user mode and still perform ``regular'' operations. In addition, these commands have algebraic aliases, which means that you can stay in user mode when typing a symbolic expression (in what HP calls algebraic-entry mode) and still get the usual symbols (+ - +/- * / 1/x ^ ) when pressing the corresponding keys. Note, however, that in program-entry mode you will get the ALG48 command names (APOW, AINV, etc.), and that ANEG will not behave exactly like the regular +/- operation. The program AKEYS, distributed with the library, performs a more sophisticated key assignment that solves these problems (see the file AKEYS.TXT for a detailed explanation).


Claude-Nicolas Fiechter (fiechter@cs.pitt.edu), 12 May 1998