[TUHS] The most surprising Unix programs

Nemo cym224 at gmail.com
Sat Mar 21 01:07:00 AEST 2020


On 20/03/2020, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>     > From: Paul Guertin
>
>     > I teach math in college ... Sometimes, during an exam, a student who
>     > forgot to bring their calculator will ask if they can borrow mine I
>     > always say "sure, but you'll regret it" and hand them the calculator
>     > After wasting one or two minutes, they give it back
>
> [,,,]

> [...] and any reasonably intelligent high-schooler should get it
> extremely quickly; just tell them it's just a representational thing,
> number number operator instead of number operator number.

A former colleague -- electronics engineer, to boot -- told me that he
refuses to use RPN calculators because one will not always be
available and he does not want to become "dependent" on it.

Offsetting that, my wife -- who does not work in a technical field --
swears by her 32S (and still has her 35 somewhere).  I have my
caculators on my Macs all set to RPN.

Perhaps a bit mean of me, but when people were befuddled, I used to
say that my calculators used "natural" input.

N.


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