A trace mode "accountant type" for the HP 50g

If you have an HP 50g and you want to print something, your best way to printing is the HP 82240B. The distance betwen printer and calculator must be very small (around 1 inch), and the list of printing commands is not too big, in particular if you want to print accounting calculations like you would do in the 17bII.

I am sorry to come back to finance-related things. Most of my readers will be typically science-oriented folks; but many of us end up as well in jobs that involve "bean-counting": if we run a project, we need to control the budget; we need to justify our investments with NPV, paybacks and IRRs. And in that respect, we are disadvantaged with our fantastic graphic calculators.

Sometimes I just want to mimic the printing of a list of additions and subtractions that the guy sitting besides does with his lowly, chain-entry, printing calculator, with my HP 50g. So I said, "let's switch to trace mode". Oops. There is no trace mode. There is very limited information about printing. How come I am not able to print just like the HP 17bII was able to do, twenty-something years ago?

The advanced users reference book talks about vectored input: two variables, alpha-ENTER and beta-ENTER, that are executed before and after of the command that is in the command line. It requires flags 62 and 63 to be set, and 34 to be off. It is intended for a "programming trace", that is, printing the whole stack at each step.

I have modified them to be more similar to the typical "accounting trace" mode of the HP 17bII. It requires also to set automatic linefeed off, i.e flag 38 ON.

Here it is:

Alpha-ENTER

<< PR1 OBJ-> >>

Beta-ENTER:

<< "[" SWAP + "]" + PR1 CR DROP PR1 CR >>

Both Alpha and Beta need to be written with the greek letter, i.e. right-shift A, right-shift B