On the pages which follow we will look at most of the functions in each group. Some of the functions are not
likely to be used at school level and so will not be covered since this book is primarily aimed at teachers and
students of high school, as are the hp 39gs & hp 40gs. If you need the higher level commands then consult
the manual.
You can obtain ‘help’ for any function in the
HOME
view by using the
SYNTAX
key to obtain the word
HELPWITH
and then typing the
function name. An example is shown right for the
MAX
command. Thus
this is saying that you have to type in two expressions, which can be
simply numbers but might be algebraic. As you can see, the custom is to
enclose arguments in < > brackets and this is the custom followed in this
text too during the later list of functions. When you use the function you
don’t actually include those brackets, just the argument. For example you would write
MAX(3.5,2A+5)
not
MAX(<3.5>,<2A+5>)
.
There is a limit to how much this
HELPWITH
statement will aid a normal user of the calculator, since these
syntax statements are usually more suited to a programmer type than to a student. However they may be
enough to trigger your memory.
One piece of terminology that will be used in this section of the manual is ‘argument’. The arguments of a
function are the pieces of information it is expecting you to feed it before it will give you an answer. These
might be numbers, variable names, lists, matrices or algebraic expressions.
The calculator will not guess what you mean. If you don’t feed it the
information it requires then it will simply give you an error message.
For example, the function
MAX
expects two arguments, both of them
numbers or expressions. Feeding it only one (or more than two) will
produce the result shown right.
These numbers can also be the contents of memories. Suppose you have
stored 10 in memory
A
and 15 in
B
. Then
MAX(A,B)
will give 15.
The commands available on the calculator are of two types. The type found in the
MATH
menu requires
brackets to enclose its arguments and in this type of command the arguments are separated by commas.
Examples are:
MAX(15,X)
or
POLYFORM(2(X+3)^3,X)
or
ROUND(3.4465,3)
The second type is more common in programming commands. It doesn’t enclose its arguments in brackets
and uses semi-colons to separate them. See the chapter on Programming for information on these commands.
They are found in the menu that pops up when you press
SHIFT CMDS
.
Examples are:
DISPXY 3;5.4;1;"Hello"
or
BOX 1;1;-4;3
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