cctalk Digest, Vol 125, Issue 13

I hope that I have not made anyone feel that I was making any less of them. If one were to right down the steps they used to solve a problem with several levels of parenthesis, I think they'd find that it was the same as RPN. I learned to solve problems with pencil and paper. The calculator I used was a slide ruler. When exposed to RPN, I found it quite clear that it was just what I was already doing. I would suppose that anyone used to a calculator the had built in brackets and the person hadn't spent a large amount of time unraveling the correct order to solve equations would not find RPN that friendly. For me it seemed more natural because it was just what I'd been taught to do to solve problems. Later when I learned BASIC, I wondered why, when telling a computer what to do, I was back to spelling out equations that I only found the format useful for reduction of problems, not for solving problems. When first exposed to Forth I could understand why people wanted to mix there programming languages up with mixed things. Part of the was to tell the computer what and when to do something while part was to scramble it up and ask the computer to waste its time figuring it out. I knew then that to tell a computer what and when to do something without making mistakes took doing just that. No mixing. Forth may not be the perfect language but it is closer than any other that I've seen. Dwight