Can we have RPN back?

[Joe Horn]

(01-26-2014 06:27 PM)Cristian Arezzini Wrote:  It would be interesting to know, outside of this forum (which admittedly is a "museum", with its users focused mainly on older technology) how many people prefer the "older-style" RPN versus the new.

Here's a sobering thought. Infinite-stack command-line RPN was introduced in 1987. That's 27 years ago, almost twice as long as the period when only 4-level X-entry RPN reigned supreme in handheld calculators. How old can something get and still be called new?

I vote for NEITHER old-style or new-style RPN. I want a brand-new HYBRID entry method which uses RPN logic for input, has an infinite stack (why limit yourself when it isn't necessary to do so?), and displays all the intermediate results like RPN does, but also accumulates each operation into an algebraic expression and shows that too. In other words, RPN input with algebraic history on an infinite stack. That would be perfect for teaching RPN to kids, since they could see the entire history of what they've done in a single glance. It would be good for us too, since you'd have instant verifiability of what you did, unlike current RPN in which you just have to blindly hope you didn't press any wrong keys along the way... or use a printer in "trace mode", which is expensive, slow, and nowhere near as readable as a single algebraic representation would be.

That's my dream.