4 ms·
It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator. That sai
by cbhl 12y ago
It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator.
That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.
- derekp7 12y agoThat's the kicker -- order of operations wasn't a requirement (and probably wouldn't have been allowed) either. Maybe I should have put a mode button on it so that you can select the desired mode. But that experience did teach me a valuable lesson -- always follow the specifications as close as possible, don't try to innovate (unless working on your own projects). And, I've learned to spot (and explain) contradictory / intractable specifications up front.
- jacquesm 12y agoIn a way it is a pity that that was your take home lesson. You deserved an A++ and the take home should have been that going the extra mile gets rewarded.
- derekp7 12y agoI did have a couple other classes that were a bit better -- Assembly (BAL on an IBM Mainframe), in which the instructor presented an award to me at the end of the semester, my very own pocket protector. And a C class I took, had a similar calculator project, so I ended up doing a parse tree with recursive evaluation in order to do handle operator precedence and parentheses. In that class, the instructor made handouts out of my homework assignment to go over as an example of good programming technique and an intro to algorithms for the rest of the class. Made me feel special at the time.
- gayprogrammer 12y agoYet, in CS courses it doesn't. An A+ means you passed all of the automated tests.
- Carrok 12y agoI've been a senior developer for almost a decade now. I've never heard of RPN. Not everyone took the same classes you did, get off your high-horse.
- blahedo 12y agoYou could certainly be a software developer, and a reasonably competent one, without having heard of RPN. I would argue that it's harder to be a computer scientist---and shocking to manage to get to the PhD level in computer science---without having at least a little exposure to RPN: it's a classic example of stack manipulation and has important theoretical relevance to programming language theory and compiler design.
- yebyen 12y agoWhile it is true that for every thing that anyone says "everyone knows" at any given time in the world, 250 people are being born every minute on average. I think you know where I'm going... those people don't know anything, so it's clear that some much larger fraction of the general population don't know that thing. I am personally doubly surprised as GP to find two people in a discussion about Computer Science at a college level that have not heard of RPN before. For what it's worth!
- sleepychu 12y agoDoes the expansion of the initialisation help? Reverse Polish Notation.
- jacquesm 12y agoHe was talking about college level CS instructors, not about developers, senior or otherwise.
- xorcist 12y agoIf you have taken engineering at a college level you probably least bumped into a handheld HP calculator at least once. If you have taken an introduction to the Unix/Linux shell, you most probably saw the dc command.