Is RPN still relevant?

[brouhaha]

(10-05-2015 06:58 AM)cyrille de brébisson Wrote:  Since algebraic does NOT have temporary, unnamed storage (the stack),

Algebraic most certainly does have temporary, unnamed storage, which is usually implemented internally to the calculator as a stack. It's called parenthesis. The intermediate values of parenthesized subexpressions are on most calculators every bit as opaque as intermediate values in the RPN stack, if not more so, though the HP-71B "Calc Mode" is a notable counterexample. RPL machines are actually better about this, since they show you the stack contents.

That said, I agree that the education market doesn't need, and is in general not well served by, RPN or RPL calculators. As with all generalizations, there are some exceptions, but as a percentage of the calculator market, they are 0%. The only significant market for RPN calculators is the HP-12C, and that's only because it was so much better than the competing financial calculators of the time that it set a standard. If there was actually any non-trivial education market for RPN or RPL calculators, TI, Casio, and Sharp would be making them.

The reason Richard Ottosen and I are making our own RPN calculators is that we don't care that much about the education market, or about the mainstream calculator market in general. We're making the product primarily for ourselves, and if we can also sell a few to enthusiasts, so much the better. The enthusiast market is too small for giant multinational corporations to consider, except to the limited extent that they can at low incremental cost cram a few extra features with enthusiast appeal into an otherwise mass-market calculator.

I can't speak for the other people who are also making their own RPN or RPL calculators, but I suspect their motivations are similar to ours. Despite many complaints about how much our calculator is going to cost (estimated USD $299), we'll be very lucky if we don't lose our shirts selling it. $299 sounds like a lot of money, but the HP-65 cost $795 at introduction, which is $3,843 in today's dollars. While our calculator doesn't have the superb industrial design of the HP-65, I'd like to think that we beat it substantially in functionality, while being less than 1/12th the price. In fact, our price is under a third of the inflation-adjusted price of the HP-41C, and only 24% higher than the inflation-adjusted price of the HP-42S, the closest HP products in concept to what we're making.

I consider myself very lucky that I was introduced to HP calculators with RPN when I was in sixth grade. While I wasn't able to buy my own HP calculator until the HP-41CV was introduced, by which time I was in high school and had a part-time software development job, various people including some of my teachers let me use their HP calculators, starting with friends' HP-67 and HP-19C, and a chemistry teacher's HP-97.