HP48 Insights II usability for 48G

[jonmoore]

Full agreement, that anything written by Mr Wickes is worthy of one's time.

The real value of Bill's 'Insights' books for me personally (inclusive of the orginal one for the HP28), is that it helped make sense of the broad design strategy behind RPL - specifically how it was intended to be an improvement on RPN by mirroring design elements from LISP and FORTH. The specifics of the available functions mayhave changed between the the 28C and 50g, but the broad thinking that informed the design of RPL remained consistent.

Whilst many would argue that RPL wasn't an improvement over RPN (due to it's increased complexity), LISP was probabaly the dominat programming language in academia in the late 80's early nineties (particuarly for faculty staff in mathematics and the sciences) so it actually helped adoption in those scenarios. FORTH natively utilises a reverse polish syntax, so it's understanable why the HP team first explored FORTH when they released the FORTH ROM for the HP71B and took inspiration from FORTH when creating RPL.

When you approach RPL with the added context of it's RPN/FORTH/LISP melting pot, it makes far more sense. And on that basis, reading the Insights volumes, whilst refering to the 48G Series Advanced User's Refernce - https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/...aur-en.pdf - should answer most usrRPL needs. If you want that go down the systemRPL rabbilt-hole there's other literature available here: https://literature.hpcalc.org/all