I love Emacs but the calculator, being stack based is just too awkward for me. I know there is the "algebraic mode" but it still is too much. Is there a way to configure it to work like, say, SpeedCrunch (my favorite calculator by far) ?
http://www.speedcrunch.org/download.html even links to 32- and 64-bit prebuilt Qt binaries for Linux. Nice.
For computations such as 10+3, it's comparabale. But I give SpeedCrunch an dedge because it can compute "sin(pi/2)" out of the box.
I still can't wrap my brain around a RPN calculator well enough to use it productively (but boy howdy can I tell you how the stack engine works!). All the cool kids in physics class in the 80's were using HP's, and I felt left out even then. Never managed to make it work for myself.
Normal (non-algebraic) calculators are inconsistent. To get "2+3", it's infix: 2, +, 3, =. To get "cos(45)" it's postfix: 45 cos (and no equals). And something like "cos(2+3)" is a mixture of both. RPN, is always the same, numbers first, then operators, and usually more keystroke efficient. Some operators take multiple arguments.
RPN also has the advantage of (rarely) needing a memory register, since the values can be left on the stack and accessed as they are needed.
It takes a little practice to start thinking postfix, but it's a relief to not consider order of operations, and tends to be a lot more consistent with how I do arithmetic in my head in the first place.
Just prefix every expression with '