HP Prime - worthy successor to HP-71B ?

[Garth Wilson]

(09-27-2017 08:01 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  I think it is genetically coded somehow. There are people who can understand/master RPL and then there are those (like me) who simply can't, no matter how hard they try.

I myself cannot latch onto C, after having been through the K&R book and part of another one. To me, C is an absolute disaster of a language that never should have hit the streets. When I got into Forth though, I used Leo Brodie's book "Starting Forth," and it just seemed totally natural for me, and I immediately picked it up and flew with it (strange differences in the HP-71 notwithstanding). As I was discussing this with a friend, he said I seemed to have an RPN brain. I do believe there's something innate about it in the brain.

That's not to say background doesn't have anything to do with it though, as I understand the Korean language is RPN, so native Korean speakers find RPN-based languages to me more natural than Americans generally do. Where we say "put on shoes," they would say something more like "shoes, install," putting "shoes" on the "stack" and then saying what to do with them, instead of the verb, object order of English.

I don't know RPL, but what I've seen of it appears to be a lot like Forth. Actually, my HP-71 is where I learned Forth. I prefer Forth over BASIC, even though the 71's Forth implementation is very poor compared to its BASIC implementation. The HP-71 with its outstanding BASIC, especially with the math module and the many Language-EXtension files I got from the CHHU Chronicle, was very powerful, certainly much more powerful than the 41, and I even typed a lot on the 71 at 30wpm back in the day; but for a calculator, I reach for my 41cx every day, and my two HP-71's sit untouched for months at a time.