Re: Natural display V.S. RPN, which is better? Message #2 Posted by Thomas Radtke on 5 May 2013, 3:51 a.m., in response to message #1 by Waon Shinyoe (China)
RPN is for sure born for it's small footprint in firmware/electronics. But it turned out to be useful beyond that.
In my opinion, in school it should be more important to deal with numbers rather than equations and their results. Understanding *how* an equation works is necessary, too.
RPN gives you all this: You need to understand a formula before entering it and you see all intermediate results. I do not want to elaborate this further, but e.g. in physics, the validity of an equation might be given only if some subterms are positive/negativ, larger zero or similar. You simply cannot see this easily with straightforward equation editing.
I started in life with a Casio, went over to RPN with the 32SII and never looked back. Is was pure luck, I had no idea about RPN or that this calculator did no real algebraic editing (except for the equation editor, of course).
Natural display is for lazy people just want to generate numbers, no matter how valid they are or what they are. You better use Excel for this.
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