From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2020 20:31:29 +0100 Subject: [COFF] The most surprising Unix programs In-Reply-To: (Clem Cole's message of "Fri, 20 Mar 2020 15:11:10 -0400") References: <202003132331.02DNVaxN061501@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <7ec47fd97b1a3d383ffed428f21f5287@firemail.cc> <6D9CA6C2-BDF2-4BCA-9503-0F8415C594C9@guertin.net> <211b9d54-573c-05d3-2c60-e15a9fc0b86b@tnetconsulting.net> <202003201640.02KGerlG470796@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <0b0d0ba3-7eae-a844-cc9a-ae542edb302b@tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: Clem Cole writes: > In my case, I was probably a tad more careful because I was being > forced to thinking in terms of precedence - but I was thinking about > the equation. Whereas with the TI I was just hitting the button per > the equation on the paper. I typed a tad faster on the TI than the HP > because I was not thinking as much but ... I probably made more typing > errors there because I thought less about what I was doing. That sounds like a good summary. I started out on TI programmable calculators (my first was a TI-57 that I still have, and that still works), but moved on to RPN with an HP41CV. Today, I find entering calculations into an RPN calculator simpler, because I naturally think in terms of the stack. With a traditional calculator, I have to look at the (possibly just mentally imaged) formula that I need to evaluate, and type it in character by character, whereas the RPN calculator lets me think about the calculation to be performed, and just enter that. -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay