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From: Publicly Anonomous Use on 11 Apr 2008 13:55

For the facile articulation and manipulation of mathamatical expressions,

who triumphs? Nspire-CAS or HP 50G ?

From: Publicly Anonomous Use on 11 Apr 2008 14:06
Publicly Anonomous Use <Public_Email(a)No_Public_Email.254> wrote in
news:Xns9A7D6F4C87AF4IDToken254(a)66.250.146.128:

>
> For the facile articulation and manipulation of mathamatical expressions,
>
> who triumphs? Nspire-CAS or HP 50G ?
>
>

I don't think I like this in the bid description:

"Quickly and easily select the proper syntax, symbols and variables from a
template..."

-Sounds like a Casio convolution.




Tag:"Who can afford experience?"
From: username localhost on 11 Apr 2008 14:28
On Apr 11, 1:55 pm, Publicly Anonomous Use
<Public_Email(a)No_Public_Email.254> wrote:
> For the facile articulation and manipulation of mathamatical expressions,
>
> who triumphs? Nspire-CAS or HP 50G ?

Well now, that is invoking a bit of a holy war, but the honest answer
is that they both have strengths and weaknesses whose importance
greatly varies with with the user, as well as with the user's
experience with each.

(I'm not very familiar with Nspire, but I'm reasonably confident that
many of the overall differences in philosophy between the Ti-89 and
the HP50g also apply to the Nspire).

For example, the TI's auto-simplification is a nice feature, and often
produces the desired result or very close to it. But if it fails to do
so, there is relatively little you can do to convince it to transform
the expression to the form you wanted. The HP50g simplifies very
little by default, but has a wide array of commands to manipulate the
result into your desired form. With expereince it is easy to get the
form you want, but in the begining it is rather difficult. As for
general entry of symbolic equations (or even numeric ones large enough
that entering them step by step is error prone) the best testament to
the HP50g's equation editor's design is the fact that it was ported to
the TI-89 twice, once as a free app Hail, and once as EQW (originally
available as a crippled free version, and a for-pay flash app
version).

I'm not sure if Nspire has a version of the equation editor built-in,
but it would not surprise me. Assuming the Nspire support for units is
the same as the TI-89's then it is by default slightly nicer than
HP50g's unit support. Etc.

The real bottom line is that the Ti-offerings are somewhat more user-
friendly, and have a much shallower leaning curve, but the HP50g in
general is far more powerful and customizable than TI's offerings. Of
course there are almost certainly a few small exceptions, but that's
life.
Some other notes. Virtually all the functions in the the NSpire will
work more-or-less as expected with symbolic arguments. For a variety
of reasons, a fair number of HP50g commands do not have support for
symbolic arguments, but in many cases there is a version of the
function present that does have support.
From: sc_usenet on 11 Apr 2008 20:01
On Apr 11, 2:28 pm, username localhost <username.localh...(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> I'm not sure if Nspire has a version of the equation editor built-in,
> but it would not surprise me. Assuming the Nspire support for units is
> the same as the TI-89's then it is by default slightly nicer than
> HP50g's unit support. Etc.
>

I have both the TI-89 Titanium and the HP 50g and think the 50g has
much better unit support than the 89-Ti does *if you know how to use
the HP*. The ideal method of unit manipulation is not discussed in the
user manual -- instead, a slower, more cumbersome method is
demonstrated.

On the 50g with soft menus (-117 SF), units are very easy to use. [r->]
[UNITS] (the 6 key) brings up a soft menu of types of units (e.g.
length, area, volume, time, speed...). Each of these contains the
units of that category. Pressing the corresponding soft key multiplies
whatever is in stack level 1 by that unit. Right-shifting that soft
key will attempt to convert whatever is in stack level 1 to that unit,
if the units agree (i.e. you can't convert 5 feet to hours). Finally,
left-shifting the soft key will divide by that unit. This is much
easier than the CONVERT command.

On the TI-89, you must first type in the value, then the unit, then
the "arrow" convert operator, and then finally the unit to be
converted to. The HP simplifies this greatly by making unit conversion
a two-keystroke process and is very efficient for chain-calculations.

S.C.
From: sc_usenet on 11 Apr 2008 20:08
On Apr 11, 1:55 pm, Publicly Anonomous Use
<Public_Email(a)No_Public_Email.254> wrote:
> For the facile articulation and manipulation of mathamatical expressions,
>
> who triumphs? Nspire-CAS or HP 50G ?

Depends. The TI line is excellent for the average high school student
who just wants his calculator to spit out the answer in a form similar
to the back of the book. TI was aiming for the educational market, so
this makes sense.

The HP is much better for "outside-the-box" thinking where the user
must come up with her own equations to use as opposed to simply
copying them out of a textbook. This is valuable for real-world
problem solving as well as mathematics competitions. The HP's RPN mode
gives it a huge advantage when it comes to performing a series of
operations on a number. There is no issue with intermediate rounding
and it also saves keystrokes (and therefore time).

So basically, if you're a student (high school, college,...), the TI
will probably suit you better, unless you're the type of student who
is willing to invest extra time to tinker with things. If you're out
of school and need a calculator for math, the HP might be better as it
is more flexible. If you're out of school and need to do serious math,
you shouldn't be using a calculator anyway and probably already have
some math program installed on your computer.

S.C.
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