Re: RPN for TI's
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Re: RPN for TI's
joe D. wrote:
> I have been a faithful HP user for over a decade. I have recently
> received a TI-89 as a present and was wondering if anyone
> has written a program will let users input in RPN rather than the
> standard notation. the TI-89 is a nice calculator and I would
> use it much more if I had the ability to switch to RPN.
>
> -JoeD
Give it a fair shot. For most simple calculations, there is no
advantage to RPL, since the 89 makes it very easy for you to use the
last answer or to access any element on the scrolling history screen:
It is true that RPL allows you to avoid parenthesis, but it makes
difficult the identification of intermediate quantities on the stack,
and requires considerable mental juggling in a program.
Programming the 89 is easier and most importantly, more readable than
the HP. Unless you use algebraics, RPL code is quite difficult to
read. Other postfix systems such as APL and J suffer from the same
problem. This is compounded on the HP by the stripping of the comments
from the code.
The 89 has considerable superiority's, but still I think that overall
the HP is a more capable machine: its user instruction set and built
in capabilities are greater. The 89 is certainly superior in ease of
use -- almost anything one wants to do is easy, and the equations look
very much like equations on paper. However, the HP has a vast code
repository for doing almost anything one could want: for example,
Alg48 and Erable make it as good if not better at symbolics than the
89. Undoubtedly, HP will bring out their next machine with many of
these codes built in.
--
Bob Wheeler --- (Reply to: bwheeler@echip.com)
ECHIP, Inc.
References: