[COFF] The most surprising Unix programs

[Terry Jones]

I also love RPN, dc, & the HP calculators. I wrote an RPN calculator in
Python recently (I call it via a shell alias called pc). It imports much of
the math, operator, and builtins modules, so you can use it just like dc,
but with much more stuff available:

$ pc 200 pi \* log10 sqrt
1.6727760963016285

You can push arbitrary Python objects and functions onto the stack. Install
with pip install rpnpy  Source at https://github.com/terrycojones/rpnpy

Terry


On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 8:48 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff at minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 3/20/20 1:43 PM, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote:
> > What I think I'm hearing you say is that with RPN you were shouldering
> > part of the computational load based on how you were entering things so
> > that they aligned as necessary with the stack.  Conversely, you were
> > simply "plug and chug" (as I've heard elsewhere).  Meaning you entered
> > the equation / formula and were largely hands off from the calculation.
>
> I can see how this could be translated to RPN could cause someone to
> feel like they have a better understanding of what's being calculated.
> Conversely, infix notation leaving someone feeling separated from the
> calculation and having much less of an understanding of what's being
> calculated.
>
> This separation making it more likely that people will have problems
> estimating and having any idea if what they're doing makes any sense or
> not.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
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