Yes. And as an avid HP-50g user, I wouldn't have much problem switching everything I do to postfix. After you get used to it, everything is a lot easier.
It is an interesting point the author makes concerning linguistic influence on using infix notation or prefix notation. Aside from grammar, there is really no reason to do things that way.
Consider the following sentences:
"Mix 2 eggs with 1 cup flour" (prefix)
"We ate dinner" (infix)
In both cases, the first step is to fetch the operands, being 2 eggs and 1 cup flour and "we" and dinner. Only after we fetch them can we apply the operator, to mix and to eat. Both of these sentences are carried out in postfix.
That's the way cpu instructions are executed. The read stage comes before the execute stage.
> using infix notation or prefix notation. Aside from grammar, there is really no reason to do things that way.
Even grammar isn't a reason to do things that way. In English:
"2 eggs with 1 cup of flour are to be mixed" =passive (postfix)
"Dinner we ate" =topic fronting (postfix)
Subject, verb, & object are a feature of the grammatical (transitive) structure of English. The order the nouns are introduced is a feature of the thematic structure. They're orthogonal to each other (though some combinations are less common than others). English lets us mix the two structures any way we want.
HP 42s user here. A few years ago I went to buy a second one, so went to EBay... they were going for a few hundred dollars. I bought mine for about $90 new. One of the few pieces of electronics that seems to have gone up in price.
Another HP50g user here. My friends disliked the RPN mode for the first few weeks (they couldn't borrow my calculator), but even they got used to it within 10 minutes of button mashing and errors.
Has anyone actually been able to use all of its built-in functions though?
There's no example the author gives that contradicts it, but it's not quite RPN. In Lisp, the + operator is variadic -- it can take any number of arguments. So in reverse-Lisp, this would be legal code:
