Walkthrough of an RPL program for an RPN programmer

[pier4r]

(08-25-2018 01:35 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Hello!

As I am quoted in the original and really excellent (!) post of this thread I need to comment quickly... (have been away for work last week and couldn't do it earlier).

Having read the posting and the replies shows me several things:

1. RPL is not RPL, not even within HP.
2. RPL experts are not RPL experts, at least every one seems to use it in his own special way.
3. RPL is definitely not for the occasional user.
4. Some RPL implementations are exrtemely powerful. 2500 built in functions. Impressive! But who remembers all those when he needs them?

1. That's normal. things evolve. You can do things with awk 4.1 that are much different with awk 2.x . That is true for any language that evolved slowly over time. I'd say that it is life. A bit like German, you cannot say that the German today is the same of 150 years ago, but it is has the same name.

2. True and false. Everyone in every language has his style unless there is a mainstream guideline how to write code. In any case the important part is that "obscure" things can be explained. And there are few RPL experts here, the others (like me) are at most power users.

3. I do agree, unless the program is trivial. But which language is for an occasional user? I am interested here. Maybe basic?

4. There is the manual. 2500 functions (or let's say: 2500 non trivial words in a dictionary) are plenty, either one uses them night and day or one needs a lookup (and online discussion or community help too). And I strongly disagree with "less is more". No, to keep down development time having a function ready made, reliable and quite fast is gold.

"Oh I want to SORT a list". Too bad, SORT doesn't exist. "Well I can use DOSUBS". Too bad, dosubs doesn't exists too. That's a lot of overhead only for sort. Without entering the realm of math functions.

The RPL library, even without additions, is something amazing. It covers a lot of needs. I wish the 50g had more ram . But I need to push the prime too.