No RPL?

[Joe Horn]

(12-17-2013 01:55 AM)jgreenb2 Wrote:  The problem is that it's Basic.

I might be missing your point, but how is HP PPL anything like "Basic"? It's far closer to Pascal than to any version of BASIC that I've ever seen. It's almost nothing like HP-71/75 BASIC. Or do you simply mean that it uses variables instead of a data stack? That doesn't make it BASIC. You can't mean that it's structured, since RPL is even more structured than most BASICs (except perhaps so-called "True BASIC"), even annoyingly so (I still miss GOTO in User RPL!).

Personally, I find the human readability (and hence maintainability) of HP PPL lightyears ahead of RPL. RPL (like all RPN programming) is a "write-only" language. A month after writing an elegant RPL program, the source code looks like a bunch of random stack juggling, necessitating an avalanche of comments. HP PPL is readable at a glance, even with no comments. And it runs roughly 200 times faster than RPL. What's not to like?

Of course, for some people, the problem with HP PPL is that It's Not The Programming Language Which I Happen To Already Know. That's an understandable source of frustration (because human inertia is a strong natural force), but it's not a valid objection.

If I missed your point, please elucidate it, and accept my apology in advance.