Reverse Polish Notation - sounds like the punch line to a really bad math joke
Sorry for OT.
All thing look really amaizing. I'd love to see more in this topic.
RPN vs Infix/Algebraic used to be a holy-war topic. Like emacs vs vi, or iPhone vs Android.
Once you go RPN, you can never go back again.
I've forgotten it all now, of course. How often do I need to calculate something?
(The main benefit is that (R)PN is parenthesis-free, so it makes it easier for a calculator to process expressions with multiple operators. The use in programming languages is nonexistent but to make clear that +, *, .. are just like any other function call, where you would naturally use polish notation.)
There's even a "Reverse Polish Lisp" on HP calculators!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_b...
It's a great choice for tightly constrained devices, though far fewer devices have such constraints now. The mental overhead of having to track stack-effects for each function makes it difficult to scale to large systems and maintain productivity, but if you're trying to eke every iota of power out of a chip with a tiny amount of ROM, it's hard to beat a direct-threaded (or token-threaded...) Forth.
> The main benefit is that (R)PN is parenthesis-free
... so what you're saying is Lisp has all those parenthesis just to troll us?
Seriously though, using PN can make implementing parsers a lot simpler as it makes the grammar less ambiguous.