3 ms·
RPN was what folks used before FP was created, to make other folks feel dumb.
by dboreham 2y ago
RPN was what folks used before FP was created, to make other folks feel dumb.
- Tor3 2y agoWhat's "FP"? Nothing comes to mind. As for myself, I had a Texas Instruments TI-30, I think it was, in my higher studies - it was a price revolution at the time. That was a fine simple calculator, but when somebody let me try their HP calculator a year or two later I was sold and I never looked back. RPN is just so much easier when you want to do long calculations - just begin, no need to plan things in advance.
- charlieglass 2y agoI took it to mean "Functional Programming".
- EfficientDude 2y ago[dead]
- adrian_b 2y agoAbout the decision to use RPN in HP-35, Tom Osborne said this: "I was a bit concerned about the stack architecture and RPN notation, but that all went away when I demonstrated one of the first prototypes to my mother-in-law, who is anything but a mathematician. After I had done some fairly complex operations, Fran said, "How many things can you stack up in that machine?" With that comment, my worries disappeared."
- nyrikki 2y agoFor those who struggle with RPN (postfix), it is really just a linearized tree. Starting with the infix a+bc The tree form of that is: + / \ a * / \ b c If you walk around that tree, starting at the root counter-clockwise and looking left, only writing down an operator after you have seen both operands and you have postfix (RPN) a b c * + Same with postscript.