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From: sburke@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Scott Burke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: More units
Message-ID: <10800@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 13 Feb 91 09:24:27 GMT
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA
Lines: 34

Hi.

I must have missed the earlier unit posting, so I must briefly rehash a small
units problem/question/curiosity:

# FA53h SYSEVAL 2 GET gives 1_m, on which BYTES returns #     0d  2.5
1_m UBASE             gives 1_m, on which BYTES returns # 59779d 12.5
1_m                   gives 1_m, on which BYTES returns # 54012d 16

This is interesting.  Please (;-), all I want to do is check if a quantity
that I UBASE (which may or may not be really ugly) is in fact equal to 1_m,
because I want to know _what_ units the quantity had.

The suggestion by James Cloos was to do 1_m UBASE <ugly> UBASE SAME, but 
here's the caveat:  There are several possible units, and it is _slow_ to
build the list { 1_m 1_... ... }, so that I can do a <list> object POS to
find out if I have an acceptable unit.

The first line of attack was to simply store the acceptable units as strings
in a list like { "'1_m'" ... } and so far I am standing by that as the best
solution.  I tried the obvious ploy:  Build the dumb list first, on the 48
stack, using UBASE.  This gives a list of the correct things.

But AHA when that list is inserted in a program with |STK key in the editor,
and then that source code is uploaded in ASCII to the Mac and then down-
loaded in ASCII to the calculator, guess what?  It changed, and 1_m \=/ 1_m
again, just like before.

I don't mind using the string approach (it may be smaller, too!), but is 
there another idea out there?  When I saw the SYSEVAL posted, I thought that
it would return a list of the UBASE versions of the units, but it doesn't.

Scott.
sburke@jarthur.claremont.edu