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Comment by opencl | Hacker News Reader

The HP codes aren't too bad because they correspond to the location of the keys on the keyboard, i.e. y^x is 21 because it's the second row and first column of the keyboard. If you want something really confusing try programming a Soviet Elekronika calculator, they actually work fairly similarly to the HPs but the codes displayed on the screen when inputting a program are in hexadecimal displayed with weird symbols because you can't actually show A-F on a seven segment display.

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Ah, I forgot all the fun I had squaring EGGOGs.[1] I'm working on fully documenting the MK-52 in English but I've been sidetracked with school.

[1]: for the uninitiated, when you'd do anything meaningful on the MK-52 (or 61 or one of the other ones in the series) you'd get an "ErrOr". the "ErrOr", in cyrillic, looks like "EGGOG" because "r" and the cyrillic g look similar, so a lot of people call them EGGOGs. sometimes you could square them and do other things to mess even farther with the calc. in my research I've found that there are more undocumented functions than documented, a lot have to do with the EGGOG manipulation and isolating them and entering that into a program. wild stuff

I've typically seen A-F rendered like so:

   _         _        _   _
  |_|  |_   |    _|  |_  |_
  | |  |_|  |_  |_|  |_  |

(Variations would be a double-story lower case 'a' and lower case 'c'.)

But if they cloned the 7447 decoder they'd look like

                   _     
     _    _   |_| |_   |_ 
    |_    _|       _   |_

with 15 blank.

> you can't actually show A-F on a seven segment display.

Yes you can - I used a 7 segment display with hex numbers (a 6800 Dev kit of some kind) - A, b (lower case), C, d (lower case again) E, F are all straightforward.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-segment_display

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