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Comment by cjsuk | Hacker News Reader

As a former RPL programmer out of self interest, I think I’d rather gouge my eyes out now. It’s one of those languages, like Perl, where you come back to a project later and can’t understand any of it or remember how to write it.

I respect people who managed to build a working CAS in it however!

I still own an HP50g for the sake of nostalgia but it has been replaced with python and a new Casio FX-991EX now.

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Does the casio run python? I like the idea of having a portable machine I can write quick programs in, but some of these calculator languages are horrible. I'd rather write it in something a bit more mainstream like python or R.

The numworks calculator[1] has got a kinda beta implementation of python. The other device I was thinking of was the Gemini (modern day psion) or something similar.

[1]https://www.numworks.com

No it doesn't. It's really just a scientific calculator with a solver built in. It handles perhaps 95% of my requirements pretty well. Anything more complicated than that heads to a mac. I've been using scipy, matplotlib and sympy on that.

The basic graphing calculators from Casio, while not overly powerful have a programming language that you can effectively drive on the device very easily. I've seen people do some amazing stuff on them.

Although I agree with your general feeling (RPL is mostly a write-only language), RPL is still a quite valid language to add useful formulas in some menus.

For example, I still have many programs for electrical circuits, like adding resistances in parallel, and those ones are easy to understand. Full programs with many functions and branches? I had no idea what I was doing.

That's exactly what I was using mine for.

  << INV SWAP INV + INV >> 'RPAR' STO

Then I realised I don't bother with it. Can get close enough in my head. I only want to solve for one variable so the Casio gets full marks there.

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