RPL second impressions (HP 28)

[Claudio L.]

(06-30-2018 11:35 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  So you're advocating sacrificing speed for readability, i.e., completely going against what the RPL paradigm posits. Stack juggling is virtually incompatible with "readability".

Most of the "bad" things mentioned here about RPL are a consequence of the particular implementation decisions, rather than the language itself. There's no real reason why using named variables should sacrifice speed, other than that's the way it was implemented, same thing with expressions.
As an example, newRPL implements named local variables in a way that using them is as fast (if not faster) than stack juggling. There's also no reason why comments can't be persistent (similar to REM in Basic).
I think RPL is not particularly difficult to read, unless you obfuscate the code on purpose for the sake of speed "in-this-particular-implementation".

(06-30-2018 11:35 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  You know what ? The RPL case reminds me a lot of a hobbyist personal computer of the 80's (I think), the Jupiter Ace, which had a native FORTH implementation out of the box and was being advertised as a fully structured, higher level, much faster language than Sinclair's Spectrum, so supposedly superior and/or more desirable.

You know how it all ended: almost nobody bought the FORTH computer, they only sold a few thousand units as nobody was writing commercial software for it and the BASIC listings in the popular hobbyist magazines of the time could'nt be used in FORTH. The makers were losing money big time and it ended in sheer failure despite its supposed strong points vs Spectrum's BASIC, which sold untold millions of units.

The Jupiter ACE's FORTH programming paradigm proved to be just too cryptic, it forced would-be programmers to take care of the low-level details (stacks, RPN evaluations, etc) which is precisely the kind of thing a decent language should take care of so that the programmer can concentrate on the algorithms and high-level details of the task to solve, not on "PICK3 ROT DUP SWAP ROT".

I loved the Spectrum when growing up, but I quickly abandoned BASIC in favor of raw Z80 assembler, not exactly easy reading material...

By the way, DUP SWAP is equivalent to DUP (in your example above). I get that you don't like RPL... cheers!