Advanced users have no problems with "i am in charge of creating a variable". However, we have very strong feedback from lower end users and educators that having a set of predefined variables is very important and useful to them for many reasons.

Prime in its first release is not targeted directly at high end users. What was and wasn't in the first release was not targeted at the top 1% of users. If that messes up "your workflow" as was posted in that thread, and even the fact that someone is posting about calculators, pretty much by definition means they fall in that tiny power user minority.

I feel honoured to be put into the 1% by you. Of course those unspecified many reasons might actually be good. However let me put it in a 99%ish way:

8+3*i=:A         Error:Bad argument type

Why the hell can't I assign?

8+3*i=:L1      {8+3*i}

Ah great now it works. I wonder why. And where do those curly brackets come from? There was something about different variables in the manual. I guess I'll store that in one of the complexes.

8+3*i=:C1       Error:Invalid input

is it possible to create permanent variables and lists that won't get deleted on program exit?

I read somewhere a couple of hours ago that matrices are indestructible and survive even resets

In a compiled language like C, all this work is done before the program ever launches

I recall Tim Wessmann talking about how the PPL is compiled before running and how the compiler is fast enough for there not being a point in saving the binaries. PPL is not an interpreted language.

My problem with the variables appears when using this calculator to do calculations. If it was just for programming it wouldn't be much of a problem since then I can just use long variable names - I'm typing on a PC anyways.

In CAS Mode however every character of the output counts because a line of the screen fills quickly. I can't just opt for R_n instead of Rn.And when you have both uppercase and lowercase variables should be used in the given task? I have to make up weird rules for picking variable names _all the damn time_ just because they are sitting there containing 0 {0}

• etc. in the Home Vars for no reason I can tell. At least all lowercase letters and their combinations with indices can be used. The uppercase letters however...

I'm not the only one complaining. Here's a post from hpmuseum: http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/forum.cgi?read=256099#256099

HP: you've stolen my variables. By restricting where I can use lower or upper case variables, you've DESTROYED my work-flow. Equations require a combination of upper and lower case variables... what were you thinking?

That is interesting. Regarding such OS change, however, would this affect compatibility with existing HP PPL programs?

As there hardly are any the more important question first: "would this affect compatibility with programs preinstalled?"

Except for the Graphing variables and the settings variables I don't see why any are predefined. As far as I can tell they serve no purpose whatsoever. This is what the Manual has to say:

You use Home variables to store
data that is important to you, such as matrices, lists, real
numbers, etc.

I don't get why I would want to do that.

Would it affect PPL programs? Yes. If the program used the variables while assuming they are of their respective types. For example an assignment L1:=1 now results in a list containing one element: L1={1}. This behaviour would change. If the type of L1 was initially undefined the same assignment would result in a variable of type real (I think) L1=1

Imho this is the more often expected behaviour.

Of course renaming all those home variables to chinese characters would make them rather useless (which imho they already are). So if someone from HP is reading this: How about instead add a button to create new variables in the VARS view? So that I can define my own variables "that are important to me"?
Also: Why do only variables created in the home view appear in the VARS view (some don't - something about that dialogue popping up), while some can only be found in the mem view?