dm319 wrote: ↑Wed May 24, 2023 10:50 pm
redglyph wrote: ↑Mon May 22, 2023 9:55 am
Not that RPN is very hard, but I can understand why it's seen as an unnecessary complication when you can type the equation naturally and see it properly on a screen.
I'm not sure I agree with this, RPN (or RPL) works very intuitively to me, as a latecomer to RPN. The idea of having the numbers before me and applying functions to them makes more sense to me than even formulating an equation first.
Ditto here. Algebraic shows what you get. RPN shows how you get there. I used algebraic first, but later RPN was very natural for me to pick up, and I quickly came to prefer it.
The argument in school calculators is "Algebraic lets you enter the equation just as you see it on paper!" Well, for one thing, a lot of programming work falls outside of actual equations. For another, even in the field of calculators, in real life we don't usually
have an equation in front of us. I think through it, "Let's see—I need A, and then square that; now take B, multiply it by C and add that result to the earlier one. Now I need D raised to the power of E, and divide the earlier result by that. Done. Oops, no, I still need to take the log of that..." That's the way much of real engineering is. It's only in school that you get canned problems and have the equation in the book and you're supposed to just drop the numbers in the chute and turn the crank—and then we wonder why we get graduates who passed all their classes and yet show a disconnect between that knowledge and any understanding of what the problem is in their circuit on the workbench! I've hired a lot of electronics technicians and a few engineers, and I gave all the applicants a circuit-analysis test with a dozen simple problems. Not one of them ever got it all correct. It was kind of frustrating.