HP Prime - worthy successor to HP-71B ?

[Vincent Weber]

(09-27-2017 11:59 AM)John Keith Wrote:  I personally like "the complex, obfuscated, horrible RPL language" a lot more than BASIC, so I mainly use my HP 50 these days.

This expression is Valentin Albillo's, who *hates* RPL

I used to agree with you. My first HP was an HP-48SX in 1990 for my studies. I really marveled at it, and thought how superior was RPL to everything - with the extreme concept of "everything is an object on the stack, even a program".

Then Valentin opened my mind to BASIC machines and I realized one thing. With RPL, you keep wondering questions on how to manage the stack, and get the right objet at the right level. Which may be fun for a while but is perfectlly useless: what you want is a way to easily translate your algorithm into a program. Which BASIC is much better at. Especially when it is an advanced formed of BASIC, closer to structured programming languages with functions, such the PASCAL-like HPPL.

In essence, the prime looks to me like a fast, colorful HP-49G for which the programming language has been changed from RPL to HPPL. For the best, I think.

It is no surprise that the 48 was successful in college... until the TI-89 came in 1998. The TI-92 was more user-friendly than the 48 but way too big. The TI-89 was just the right size, and its BASIC was way more friendly than RPL. HP never regained this superiority, even with the 49G (rubber keys on an HP calculator !).

The Prime may well be what the 48 should have been in the first place: A 71B in a calc format, with a large screen, high speed, and powerful math librairies.