Don't Do This in HP Calc

If you press the Date or Time keys in HP Calc, the Palmtop will beep at you and display some strange numbers on the Calc line. In Calc, use the MENU Clear Stack command and press the Date key, the Palmtop will flash some numbers and end up with a number such as 99 on the calc line. This number is the last two digits of the current year. The Y register will contain the value for the day of the month. When you press the Time key you'll wind up with a value such as 913 which is hour and minutes, i.e., 9:13AM.

This is a bug that was present in HP Calc from its earliest days. HP Calc should prevent the Date and Time keys from functioning at all. Instead, when you press those keys, System Manager tries to put a date/time number on the calc line. The calculator tries to format the number according to its own formatting options.

When the bug was first reported on the HPHand forum on CompuServe, the response from an HP representative was that this was one of those bugs that could be fixed by the user. The command to use is "Don't do that!"

To complete the picture, the Date Calc application in HP Calc uses a special format for dates, namely DD.MMYYYY. For example May 10, 1999 would be keyed in as 10.051999.

And, just in case you were wondering, the date calculations in HP Calc are Y2K compliant.