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
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.
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