4 ms·
Sexprs really suck to write by hand without editor support and a lot of mathematics is done by hand. RPN might be a better starting point for a revolution.
by zarzavat 5y ago
Sexprs really suck to write by hand without editor support and a lot of mathematics is done by hand.
RPN might be a better starting point for a revolution.
- dhosek 5y agoI remember being confronted with an HP calculator for the first time in college. I understood RPN just fine and knew that I wanted to do, e.g., 6 7 ×, but turning that into actual keystrokes on the calculator was not immediately obvious. I think I ended up doing something like 6 ⎆ 7 ⎆ × ⎆ instead of 6 ⎆ 7 × and got the understandable garbage result. I ended up doing a big chunk of my freshman physics homework doing the math by hand because I didn't own a suitable calculator.
- gumby 5y agoThe rpn calculator does the calculation the same way you would by hand — that’s the point. I’m sorry you had a difficult experience.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoThey also suck to read. Operator precedence is complicated, but actually increases readability once you are used to them, so much so that the parens seem to get in the way. Which is weird, why could that be? Perhaps the extra tree parsing required by the brain is more than made up for by some kind of visual compression economy going through the eyes?
- agumonkey 5y agowhat about RPL then :) sexprs without pair matching are horrid, but it's a solved problem since a few decades (paredit was made by zeus)