[OT] -10^2

[David Vaughan]

On Saturday, May 24, 2003, at 02:01 Australia/Sydney, Jan Schenkel 
<janschenkel at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Ah, the joys of RPN and programming one's HP
> calculator -- wonderful aye, Miscdas :-)
>
> In this case, you would have to put the 5 between the
> minus and the multiply
>
> 10  2   ^  -   5   *
>
Geoff

I did not respond to your earlier query because Jan is doing a perfect 
job and clearly enjoying it to boot :-)
In this instance, Jan has correctly delivered the concepts but it is 
also true that calculators cheat. All my HPs have also a unary operator 
called CHS or +/- so the key entry sequence could be as Jan gave it 
above or in your order:
5  10  2  ^  +/-  * (or    *  +/-    or make it    5  -    as the first 
two entries)
To explore this further (and crassly assuming you use a Mac) slip over 
to VersionTracker and search for "RPN". Two of the best are RPNCalc 
(nicely written in RealBasic, actually) which is my desktop calculator 
and for the real engineers there is a full emulation of an HP48GX 
around as well.

cheers
David
>
> Jan Schenkel.
>
> =====
> "As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same 
> time."  (La Rochefoucauld)