Plus42 Pricing and documentation

[bxparks]

(11-28-2023 06:13 AM)Marco Polo Wrote:  

(11-27-2023 10:20 PM)bxparks Wrote:  Side question: How does someone learn RPL in 2023? My last full-time calculator was the HP-42S around 1996. I left the calculator world behind until about 6 months ago. I keep reading about how great RPL is, but as far as I can tell, no HP calculator currently in production uses RPL. The HP Prime seems to have its own language. The 50G gets great reviews, but is no longer in production, and seems fairly rare and expensive on eBay, in the $120 to $175 range.

Short answer: i am using RPL calculators since 1989.
The learning curve was steep, but after one week i could use my 28s in most of its power.
On the converse, i struggle a little when switching to RPN (35s, Plus42)

One thing I noticed, while lurking on these forums for the past few months, is that RPL fans rarely miss an opportunity to say how much they prefer RPL over RPN. :-) But I guess it kinda worked, because I'm asking *how* I would learn RPL in the year 2023. (Which you haven't answered, heh.) No HP calculator currently uses it. The 50g is out of production. The HP Prime does not use it. Swiss Micro doesn't sell an RPL calculator. There are emulators on the Android Play Store, but anything that requires a ROM dump won't work for me, because I don't own any RPL calculators.

I found an app called 48sx and another one called Droid48. One seems to be a fork of the other, though I don't what the difference is. (I am not familiar with the differences between the 48S, SX, G, and GX). The initial complexity of the 48 keyboard is a slightly overwhelming. I click around and I get stuck in various menu contexts that I cannot get out of. EXIT doesn't seem to work. And what is this funny "{ HOME }" thing at the top (which also appears at the top of the Plus42)? I think learning the HP-48 series will help with the Plus42. I guess I will have to go through the manuals. I also get the impression that it is easier to learn a new calculator on a real physical calculator because I can play around with it faster. On the phone app, I don't know if nothing happened because I clicked the wrong key, or because my phone ignored my fat finger.

I suppose the question that I should have asked more directly is: *Why* should I learn RPL? It seems like a technological dead end to me, if no current calculator uses it. Judging from the size of the SysRPL reference manual, RPL may have collapsed under the weight of its own complexity. But I'm willing to spend a little bit of time to learn the basics of the HP-48, especially if that helps me understand the Plus42 app beter. The books recommended in the earlier posts ("HP 41/HP 48 Transitions" and "HP 48 Insights") look very promising. Thank you.