RPN option for school children

General discussion about calculators, SwissMicros or otherwise
mechtron
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by mechtron »

i term it brain extension rather than brain replacement. You guess which one is algebraic entry and which one is rpn :D
redglyph
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by redglyph »

dm319 wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 10:31 pm
At the University I went to, you had to pre-approve your calculator before exams. This was a sticker back in the day. I suppose if most people are using a standard calculator, then this is quick to do, with exceptions taking longer.
That's a good idea. :) But that may still force people to need two calculators: a more powerful one for every day's work, and a "dumbed-down" one for the exams. The exam mode makes it unnecessary.

They didn't bother when I was at university; maybe they should have for some exams. In some cases, they divided the exam in two parts, theory and application, and you couldn't use your calculator in the first part.
dm319 wrote:
Wed May 24, 2023 10:50 pm
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.
It's 'intuitive' to us because we're used to it now, and because we have a mathematical mind and likely programming skills that makes it more comfortable to deal with. There's a strong bias in these forums, but other people I've told about RPN were just confused and disliked it - though not all of them. Besides, if you start at more complicated formulas, it's getting more difficult to keep in mind the stack levels when you have to enter it (it's a fact that the brain is only good at keeping a very few items at a time).

If you look at an RPL program objectively, it's a entangled mess. Again, having to keep the stack content in mind when writing (or reading) the code adds a level of distraction and is more prone to errors in comparison to a more straightforward approach. For equations fortunately, the HP calculators have been displaying the algebraic format since the HP-28C.

I don't think our minds process data in an RPN way, it's a little bit like Yoda talk - in many languages we split the sentences with the verb in the middle to make the separation obvious, and clauses are articulated by conjunctions. There's a reason why we have always written formulas in an algebraic form, and using another system will never feel as natural.
Garth
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by Garth »

redglyph wrote:
Thu May 25, 2023 10:39 am
It's 'intuitive' to us because we're used to it now
RPN was intuitive to me from the moment I was introduced to it, even though up to that point, I had been using algebraic calculators.  I vastly prefer RPN's absence of parentheses and precedence rules, and near absence of syntax requirements, and its implicit parameter-passing.
Besides, if you start at more complicated formulas, it's getting more difficult to keep in mind the stack levels when you have to enter it (it's a fact that the brain is only good at keeping a very few items at a time).
I have more trouble with algebraic, counting parentheses, trying to pair them up, trying to find my error.
I don't think our minds process data in an RPN way, it's a little bit like Yoda talk - in many languages we split the sentences with the verb in the middle to make the separation obvious, and clauses are articulated by conjunctions. There's a reason why we have always written formulas in an algebraic form, and using another system will never feel as natural.
It may be partly because we speak English.  I understand Korean is RPN, so native Korean speakers find RPN much more natural; for example, where we would say, "put on shoes," they would say something more like "shoes, install."  I grew up in a Spanish-speaking country, and in fact learned to read and write in Spanish before English; and in Spanish, an adjective follows the noun that it's describing; for example, where we would say "black shoes," in Spanish it's "shoes black."
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chris185
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by chris185 »

It seems odd having a discussion about the merits of RPN on an RPN-calculator forum :-)

I liked the pseudo-RPN of my old Casio because you can check things are going ok _while_ you’re entering the equation:

5 + 25 = 30
SIN -> 0.5
x^2 -> 0.25
-1 = -0.75
+/- -> 0.75
Sqrt -> 0.866
cos -> 30

Basically, it gives you a better understanding of what’s going on, rather than just being able to say “it looks like the paper version”. To which my answer would be, “so what?”

I always found it perfectly natural (even as an 8 year old) to type

2
sqrt

To get the square root of two. It’s not a big step from there to get to full RPN.
redglyph
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by redglyph »

chris185 wrote:
Thu May 25, 2023 1:00 pm
2
sqrt

To get the square root of two. It’s not a big step from there to get to full RPN.
It's true that algebraic calculators are a little ambivalent. :D

I suppose it would be awkward to have to close a parenthesis to validate the SQRT, but they could have done that. I did a few test on Windows' calculator and it does feel weird now that I'm aware of this (I'm usually using an RPN application when I'm working on the PC).
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Walter
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by Walter »

German sentences are kind of RPN in a way since the important part of the verb is often found at the end - a fact making life difficult for interpreters translating 'simultaneously' into another language. I've met quite some ladies waiting for me to finish my sentence before they could continue their translation.
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chris185
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by chris185 »

Ok, my daughter wanted to look at my calculator. — she liked the OFFIMG.

That’s probably how to catch the young’uns! More pretty pictures :-) then they’ll say “RPN is cool! Look!” and everyone will want one.

You’d just need to give one to some TikTok influencer (one that can count up to 10 without using their fingers).
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OlidaBel
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by OlidaBel »

Walter wrote:
Thu May 25, 2023 3:55 pm
German sentences are kind of RPN in a way since the important part of the verb is often found at the end - a fact making life difficult for interpreters translating 'simultaneously' into another language. I've met quite some ladies waiting for me to finish my sentence before they could continue their translation.
exactly… ! it’s the same in dutch , the important part of the verb comes (sometimes) at the end of the sentence. Dutch speaking people listen other people before answering :D

do german people like RPN better than english speaking people ?
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redglyph
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by redglyph »

OlidaBel wrote:
Mon May 29, 2023 11:10 pm
exactly… ! it’s the same in dutch , the important part of the verb comes (sometimes) at the end of the sentence. Dutch speaking people listen other people before answering :D

do german people like RPN better than english speaking people ?
I would argue that the tangconstructie makes you closer to the bracket mindset of algebraic notation. ;)
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dm319
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Re: RPN option for school children

Post by dm319 »

redglyph wrote:
Thu May 25, 2023 10:39 am
If you look at an RPL program objectively, it's a entangled mess.
I agree, never have I seen or written such unreadable spaghetti code as trying to implement something on the HP-42s.

But I'm not referring to programming. Nor even the order. More the concept that you apply the function to the data you see in front of you. When you press 'divide', you see the two numbers you are dividing turn into the result. That is an intuitive feature of RPN.

For programming I like the numerical language R. (Using tidyverse and pipes) it has a beautiful syntax where you take all the data to being with, then apply functions sequentially on it until you get your result. (Unlike RPN, you don't see intermediate values though).
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