Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!zen!frank
From: frank@zen.UUCP (Frank Wales)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Another \"D\" idea: RPN (and more)
Message-ID: <1171@zen.UUCP>
Date: 7 Mar 88 20:52:36 GMT
References: <12088@brl-adm.ARPA> <580@tuvie>
Reply-To: frank@zen.UUCP (Frank Wales)
Followup-To: comp.sys.handhelds
Organization: Zengrange Limited, Leeds, England
Lines: 24
Summary: calculator wars!

In article <580@tuvie> rcvie@tuvie.UUCP (Dietmar Weickert) writes:
>In article <12088@brl-adm.ARPA> TLIMONCE%DREW.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes:
>>I'm really excited about the idea of a "D" programming language. Let me
>>make a suggest or two:
>> ... RPN ... [no] pointers ...
>I hope you did not really mean that! Even HP had to change to an algebraic
>input as people really disliked the polish input, stack handling, etc.

Not quite.  Only those HP calculators with business functions 
use algebraic logic now (this includes the 27S, which is a hybrid
scientific/business calculator).

HP's pure scientifics continue to use RPN, because it is the only 
consistent logic system for calculators.  This tells us something
about the scientific and business marketplaces, not the relative
merits of RPN vs algebraic logic.

Having said *that*, I would not like to see postfix notation used for
a descendant of C, because to make it fit into the language right
would involve recasting the rest of the syntax along the lines of
FORTH, and that would be a bad move.


--
Frank Wales, Development Engineer,    [frank@zen.uucp<->mcvax!zen.co.uk!frank]
Zengrange Ltd., Greenfield Rd., Leeds, ENGLAND, LS9 8DB. (+44) 532 489048 x220