6 ms·
After I got used to RPN (I had a lovely old HP-21) I found it much more intuitive. Stack-based thinking. No parentheses! (And I've used LISP for years, but that
by nealabq 13y ago
After I got used to RPN (I had a lovely old HP-21) I found it much more intuitive. Stack-based thinking. No parentheses! (And I've used LISP for years, but that's entirely different.)
RPN vs Infix/Algebraic used to be a holy-war topic. Like emacs vs vi, or iPhone vs Android.
Once you go RPN, you can never go back again.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoI learned it for some scholastic competition once. You're right, after the initial confusion, it was fast and intuitive. I've forgotten it all now, of course. How often do I need to calculate something?
- TheLoneWolfling 13y agoThe one issue I've already had with RPN is that you require a separator between numbers anyways - in RPN it's too easy to parse "23 4 +" as "2 34 +", for example, especially if you're writing quickly.
- orclev 13y agoMight have been better to demonstrate that using subtraction as addition is commutative and thus either one works fine in this case.
- anonymouz 13y agoOn the HP calculators the separator would usually be the enter key. I think the old ones displayed just the top entry of the stack, on the newer ones with bigger display you see the stack with each entry on one line.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bitwize 13y agoI know that feel, bro. ENT > =!