On 3/04/21 6:15 pm, David Mertz wrote:
It's a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure I used ticker tape adding machines with a big ENTER button to separate numbers... Then the operation, usually +, at the end.
That seems unlikely. If you don't tell it what to do with the numbers until the very end, it needs a stack big enough to hold all of them. Early RPN calculators typically had a very small stack, usually about 4 items. HP calculators had an ENTER button, but you only used it to separate the first two numbers, then used + or whatever after subsequent ones.
384 423 827 563 + ---------- ???? Isn't that what you learned in grade school?
Yes, but there the paper is your stack, and it's big enough to hold quite a few numbers. You were also probably taught to add the numbers up column by column, which is quite different from the way a calculator or computer does it!
I vaguely recall as a child using a mechanical one where you pulled a lever between lines as the "enter".
I wouldn't call that an "enter" lever, rather a "+" lever, since it was almost certainly adding the entered number to its accumulator. There will also have been some kind of mode switch to make it subtract instead of add. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/UTVPQ7PEMR7L34EWWG6K36GKULJAAQPW/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
