on the RPN mentioning sharp pc-1211, v.albillo, el-506w and recurring topics

[David Hayden]

I read somewhere (probably here) an interesting thread where some people did real-world races between AOS and RPN calculators keying in various formulas presented in textbook format. Then RPN calculators won, but not because RPN required significantly fewer keystrokes. The biggest factor was the RPN user was able to start keying in the solution almost immediately. The AOS user had to pause for a moment to figure out how to enter the expression.

I've always found RPN a much more natural way to key in an expression. But of course it's much harder to read RPN in a program. So in that sense it's sort of a "write only" language: easy to write and hard to read.

When I was in school, the killer combination for me was my 41C and my printer. When doing school work, I used the printer so I could easily double-check my work. It really stinks to lose points on a problem set because you hit the wrong calculator key.