I know the Reverse Polish is not a couple of hundred years old.
I have an impression of reading something about people writing natural
deduction systems using only dots in place of parenthesis. And it is
said that it was "natural" in those pre-historic times.
That's also why I had this (mis-)conception that ($) can be used to achieve
something similar. It would be marginally interesting, since it saves us
one character in the mental stack. I still remember looking at the parentheses
in a lisp program.
Anyways, thanks for the clarifications.
On 19 July 2011 09:51, Maciej Marcin Piechotka
On Tue, 2011-07-19 at 07:11 +0000, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
The only thing that I can think of that matches this is Reverse Polish Notation, and according to Wikipedia was about 90 years ago, not hundreds ;-)
I may be wrong but weren't the RPN calculator slightly later then 90 years ago? In any case according to wikipedia RPN was proposed in 1954 so less then 60 years ago. (PN on the other hand was found around 90 years ago).
You're right; I mis-read the wikipedia article whilst skimming it. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com