On 4/3/21 7:16 AM, Greg Ewing wrote: > 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.
Actually, on the traditional tape based adding machine, the key labeled 'Enter' was really a command to add to the running sum. The + key was actually 'Total' and commanded to print the result to the tape. The minus key was sort of the opposite of Enter, it subtracted the entry from the running sum, and depending on the machine, print the current sum. -- Richard Damon _______________________________________________ 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/7TMTDTZ3Z2L7W2XRYD4MILFSAY45NNRS/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
