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.
Of course, an "enter" delimiter isn't any fewer key presses than a bunch of '+' keys. But that emulates the way arithmetic lessons are usually written, and most people do on paper. E.g. 384 423 827 563 + ---------- ???? Isn't that what you learned in grade school? I vaguely recall as a child using a mechanical one where you pulled a lever between lines as the "enter". Not something I did on a regular basis, but something I had seen as already old fashioned when I was 10 yo. On Sat, Apr 3, 2021, 12:41 AM Greg Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > On 3/04/21 4:33 pm, David Mertz wrote: > > add all these 20 receipts together without needing 19 "+" signs, but > > just one at the end. > > Um, that's not the way any RPN calculator I've seen works. You > still need to press the "+" key 19 times, just in slightly > different places. > > To get by with just one "+" you would need some way to bracket > the arguments, then you have something more like backwards Lisp > with at least as many parens as infix. > > -- > 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/JGBUDC6HHQU4FBJSBDFXAIVBYUT5OFVB/ > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >
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