HP Prime - worthy successor to HP-71B ?

[John Keith]

To me, the problem with BASIC/HPPL is that they are too "typing intensive" for use on a hand-held device like a calculator. Even the 71B with its QWERTY keyboard is not optimized for typing. The Prime and its language lend themselves to development of programs on a PC which are then transferred to the calculator. RPL, for better or worse, is a very terse language and equivalent programs tend to be significantly shorter.

The Prime is much faster than the HP 50 and has a much nicer display, but when I have a problem to solve (or see an interesting challenge on this site) It's the HP 50 that I reach for first.

Needless to say, I am one of those people who "gets" RPL. I knew FORTH from the microcontroller world and wrote many FORTH programs on the 71B. When I first saw the HP-28, RPL seemed natural to me. Of course others think differently! :-)

John