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Comment by dpb1 | Hacker News Reader

Some of the strong points of this calculator is the main thing I use in RPN calculators with stacks. It's so helpful for me to duplicate a value and then operate on that, and be able to throw it away if I mess up, sanity check from where I started at intermediate calculations, etc. it's not identical, but many points others are mentioning in this thread are what I value from an RPN stack based calculator.

BTW, for anyone who is comfortable with RPNs, MacOS added the mode to their built-in calculator recently-ish. it's not terrible either. I've switched to it for my default experience. (even though nothing beats the HP 48g, as it's what I'm the most familiar with).

Also, on the article, really cool that someone added this on mobile. I love hearing about devs developing something that fills a niche and does so well. I feel like I'm out of ideas most days. Good for her!

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On that note, I always end up using an HP 48g emulator on my phone as my main calculator app. I've been using Droid48 for many years now [0]. I'd initially looked at most of the native mobile calculator apps before realizing that since I was comparing them all with the HP 48 experience, I might as well just use an emulated HP 48 and be done with it.

On a laptop or desktop, though, I've come to use Emacs Calc [1] pretty heavily. There's a surprising amount of power in it. It's pretty cool to be able to do things like operate on matrices of symbolic expressions via a stack interface.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.x48

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/calc.htm...

I find Hiper to be almost perfect for its clearer UI than a rendering of a real device and, especially, for its prominent binary and hex radix modes.

But it lacks the stack undo of the 48 emulators.

Ha! I use a Casio emulator as my main calculator

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=advanced.scien...

I was thinking the same thing while reading the article. I have been using RPN calculators for 40 years, and it has become second nature to manipulate the stack to have two calculations going at the same time, and then merging them, if needed.

What's the RPN based calculator you use on your terminal? I'd love to learn!

dc, perhaps.

Not sure what the parent uses, but emacs has calc, which is a RPN calculator with lots of features (including history and intermediate results) and can be used in the terminal

To be honest, I mostly use a physical calculator (Swissmicros DM41L, which is an HP41CX clone). Second choice is the i41CX+ app on my phone. The HP41 keyboard and operational patterns were etched into my brain at university, since my first engineering calculator was an HP41C.

I have used rpncalc and T_REX (https://isene.org/2021/02/T-REX.html) in the terminal, dc or gforth in a pinch.

For the HP48/50 fans here: try the HP Prime. The color display is amazing. It requires some relearning because the UI is different, but it still has full-featured RPN mode. The keys are good, too--it looks and feels like a proper HP calculator. I used a 48SX in college and 50G later, but the Prime is the one to have now. (It's also the one my daughter steals now that she's in more advanced math and science classes.)

I came here to write this.. Yeah, I'd have thought that dual-calculator thing was brilliant if I hadn't turned to RPN.

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