Recommendations for RPN Calculators?

sg3000 asks: "My trusty old HP 48S graphing calculator, that served me since engineering school, seems to be giving up the ghost. I haven't used it in a few years, but recently I put new batteries in it. It works, but it makes a loud static/white noise sound when it's on. The noise is not as noticeable when I hold it, but when I set it down on a hard surface, it's really loud. Then it sucks the batteries down incredibly fast (I put new batteries in it, and two days later, they were drained). Any suggestions on what I should buy as a replacement?"

"I'm in graduate school now, and since I'm taking an accounting course, where they don't want us digging out our laptops during a test, I need to buy another calculator. I'm a big fan of reverse polish notation (RPN), so I'd prefer to get another HP calculator.

Do companies still make calculators? I'd love to get another HP 48, but I'm not even sure if HP even makes calculators like that any longer -- on their web site, they're all cheapo-looking single line deals. I've read about something called an HP 48g, but HP has nothing about it on their web site."

Comments

Re:RPN is a mere hack and used by anal people

[ewhac]

Remind me to never hire you to write a compiler, or any other kind of lexical parser for that matter.

Yes, it's nice that modern calculators will parse the parentheses for you, but if you don't know how to transform the equation into the precise evaluation sequence required, then you may understand the equation less well than you think.

RPN forces you to transform the equation into the proper evaluation steps, which is still a useful exercise. If nothing else, the practice you get will let you more easily understand that convoluted equation starting at you from the C++ source file.

And yes, before you toss out an easily-forseeable snide rejoinder, I do know how to use a slide rule.

Schwab