advantages of RPN

[Les Bell]

(05-22-2014 01:25 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Educators fail to realize that this is not the usual situation in life though. In real life (I'm in EE), you usually don't have an equation in front of you on paper. You figure out what you need as you're punching buttons.

Exactly. In back-of-the-envelope stuff, you're working things out as you solve a problem. In your mind, you're thinking, "So that means the current in this branch is ...", and then you think, "Yes - that seems reasonable. And so the power dissipated in this resistor will be ...". An RPN calculator keeps what you're working with right in front of you, and you can use it as you reason through a problem. You're not simply evaluating a series of equations.

This, to me, is the power of RPN - quite often, the intermediate values you see as you work inside-to-outside through a calculation (and which the algebraic user never sees) have meaning, and you can check whether they seem plausible, allowing you to pick up any errors and work with more confidence.