Blast from the past for sure, OP was not but I was in Paris in the early 90s, and HP48 hacking was huge. I remember attending class, ignoring the teacher, and j

Blast from the past for sure, OP was not but I was in Paris in the early 90s, and HP48 hacking was huge. I remember attending class, ignoring the teacher, and just patiently leafing through long print outs of HP48 disassembly, or typing in assembler programs on the calculator itself. The software on this thing was pretty amazing, but surprisingly hacky in some ways. The RPL language had a system of embeddable objects in memory, but when the interpreter had to skip over an object (i.e all the time), there was no field marking its length, so it had to actually recurse through all the sub-objects to find the end. IIRC there was the a hack where some memory locations could contain a direct pointer or a pointer to a pointer, and it would work either way because the same bits could be interpreted as a pointer or directly executed... or something of that sort.