newRPL: Angles revisited

[Claudio L.]

(04-07-2016 01:55 PM)Nigel (UK) Wrote:  This discussion made me go back and look at the code for my RPN calculator for Casio machines. There is one feature which I had forgotten: a complex number carries an angle tag (radian or degrees) which specifies the angle display mode when polar display is chosen. So a complex number can be entered as polar, displayed as rectangular, and later displayed as polar still keeping the angle tag that the polar angle was entered with. Is this idea at all useful, or is it making things too complicated - especially as newRPL has to support 3D vectors?

Nigel (UK)

I intend to eliminate the "polar" mode altogether. Complex numbers and vectors can be created in polar mode by simply including angles in their definition. Once polar, it's always polar, unless a command is used to convert it to cartesian. Operations will detect this and proceed accordingly (again, keeping the format of the "left" argument to decide the format of the result).
Basically you compute with vectors, and you convert to polar the results you want to see in polar form. Or, you operate with everything in polar form and get results directly in polar form.

This starts getting weird when you add a vector as a matrix row. In such case polar vectors will have to be converted to cartesian before inserting in a matrix.
Also product of matrix*vector will have to convert to cartesian.