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Re:The early history of HP calculators by jaclaz on Sunday September 10, 2017 @02:16PM (#15213451)
Yes, you replaced (correctly) a x with a /, and this does require some (little) effort.

There is no "cooking" in the RPN input, the way you input is a little more similar to how you do manually operations, and in the order numbers are written from left to right, but of course beauty is only in the eye of the beholder.

A (as well small) advantage is that on RPN you "see" that you are dividing 16 by 8, particularly - as hinted previously - when you have a RPN calculator that allows you to visualize the stack you can see better "partial" results.

Now be nice, and do (13+3)/(3x(SQR(4+2))).

[1 3 Enter 3 + 3 Enter 4 Enter 2 + SQR * /]

Re:The early history of HP calculators by carussell on Sunday September 10, 2017 @06:07PM (#15214540)
> There is no "cooking" in the RPN input, the way you input is a little more similar to how you do manually operations

You do your pen and paper algebra in RPN?

The point of my "cooked" input comment wasn't to say that the mental overhead to convert to RPN is complicated or cannot come naturally after some time getting used to it; it was a defense of my swapping the division operation to multiply by the reciprocal. The idea is that if I hadn't pre-emptively addressed this in my first comment, I expected for someone to claim that I was cheating and feeding in "cooked" input for the infix case. My point is that if you recognize that converting to RPN is trivial and want to count that as a zero-cost operation when scoring the efficiency of RPN, then you have to recognize that converting the divisor to a reciprocal factor is just as trivial (moreso, really) and should be scored as a zero-cost operation, too.

Otherwise, what you have is an inconsistent standard where the infix conversion gets arbitrarily counted against the infix case, but the RPN conversion is somehow "free".

> Now be nice, and do (13+3)/(3x(SQR(4+2)))

I got 15 button presses, compared to your 14. I can live with that, given this is a calculator that can be picked up for $10. And that's the biggest savings, considering that the other things I had to worry about as a student were being gouged by mandatory meal plans and expensive, low-quality, on-campus housing.

FWIW, I actually like postfix notation.[1]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2213066