A sweet little poll about the WP 31S layout

[htom trites]

I think that the use of upper case for calculator key labels comes from slide rule scale labels, which were almost always upper case. Few slide rules had the names of the functions. Those that did, usually had them correctly cased in addition to the traditional upper case scale labels, eg. "sin(x) S", Tan-CoT (x) T.

Depending on when and where and disciple you learned logarithms, the standard and computer program and language you usually use, and the publication's standards and editor's preferences, you will "naturally" have different meanings in your mind for log, ln, lg, lb.

lb -- seems to be used only for log 2

lg -- means log (base indeterminate unless specified), or log 10, or log e

ln -- means log (base indeterminate unless specified), or log e, or log 10

log -- means log (base indeterminate unless specified), or log 10, or log e

It would have been convenient if hundreds of years ago it had been settled to always write lgbase(argument) but it wasn't and so we live with the mess.

Lne and Lg10 might be the least confusion propagating (although to my taste they should be ln and log.)

LOGx (y) or other variations ... please don't do that, as tempting as it is as the shift of x^y.