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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 is the hp 39g+. 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
DISPXY
command. Thus this is saying that
you have to type x and y coordinates, followed
by a font number and the item or items to be displayed.
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.
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. Feeding it
only one (or more than two) will produce the
result shown right.
These numbers could 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.
Finally, if you look at the screenshot at the top of the previous page you will
see that is another set of menus available via the
key, which stands for
Constants
. Pressing this key result in a different menu being displayed,
which shows the ‘Program Constants’. You can try it if you like but the
values listed in these menus are generally only of use to programmers.