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I don't know where the notion that RPN is more intuitive comes from. My dad had an HP-45 when I was a kid and I didn't quite grasp the concept of a stack. You'v

by ajnin 5y ago

I don't know where the notion that RPN is more intuitive comes from. My dad had an HP-45 when I was a kid and I didn't quite grasp the concept of a stack. You've also got it wrong in your example (you've got stack 1 and 2 reversed in step 2), so I guess it's not that obvious for grown ups either! When you write a formula on the blackboard it is something like (5+6)*3, not 3⏎5⏎6⏎+* or whatever. Takes a bit of mental gymnastics to convert between the two, and you need to keep the state of the stack in your head as you go. Not really viable for anything too complicated. I guess that regular calculators suck for that too, in my opinion the best are symbolic calcs where you enter the formula as you would write it, parenthesis and all, which as a bonus allows you to go back and fix mistakes and reuse formulas easily.

jonsen 5y ago
Of course for formula evaluation the ability to enter a formula directly and pressing EVAL is optimal. But for ad hoc calculation nothing beats RPN in my opinion. The HP 48 series calculators can do both.
- disabled 5y ago
  It's tricky to learn that in RPN. It's nice to be able to go back to algebraic mode on the HP calculators in rare situations where you do not know the right syntax (which can be arbitrary by calculator) for entry of equations. It took me about a month to learn RPN along with equation entry, and I did that while in my weed-out courses in engineering school. Everyone was using a different calculator than me, and while they could directly learn from each other, I had to figure out how to enter stuff on my own. But, it paid off on exams, as people who made parenthesis or entry errors got major points off. It also saved time on exams and I really did not have to double check for entry errors, which can be quite tedious on electrical engineering exams.
deleted 5y ago
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by ajnin 5y ago

jonsen 5y ago

Of course for formula evaluation the ability to enter a formula directly and pressing EVAL is optimal. But for ad hoc calculation nothing beats RPN in my opinion. The HP 48 series calculators can do both.

disabled 5y ago
It's tricky to learn that in RPN. It's nice to be able to go back to algebraic mode on the HP calculators in rare situations where you do not know the right syntax (which can be arbitrary by calculator) for entry of equations. It took me about a month to learn RPN along with equation entry, and I did that while in my weed-out courses in engineering school. Everyone was using a different calculator than me, and while they could directly learn from each other, I had to figure out how to enter stuff on my own. But, it paid off on exams, as people who made parenthesis or entry errors got major points off. It also saved time on exams and I really did not have to double check for entry errors, which can be quite tedious on electrical engineering exams.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]