Squeee! Finally someone else who has heard of and likes Eric Flint's books! Especially the 163* universe! Squee! And RPN is so lovely! I used an HP back in secondary school, and I loved it back them. (Of course, prefix notation isn't bad either.)
By the way, if you have a Webscription account, I could always donate 1634: The Gallileo Affair.
I hadn't heard of him until an argument started on a mailing list, about whether all time travel stories inherently suck, and the 163* stories were mentioned as a counterexample. (Personally, time travel in SF makes me nervous because it often sucks, sometimes in ways that break an otherwise good tale, but there have been a significant number of time travel stories I've enjoyed.) So I went looking for it, discovered I liked 1632 as much as the person who suggested it, and had to grab the next book as soon as I'd finished the first.
He makes history as interesting to me as Parke Godwin does, though his scope is more ... sort of Asimovian in a way. And he makes politics as fascinating as The West Wing does (though again, with a different feel). And actually, while reading 1633 (and a bit in 1632) I did find myself wondering about reactions of European readers compared to my own reactions.
I too was exposed to RPN by way of HP in high school. I was skeptical when a friend tried to explain why his HP-29C was so much better than my TI-30, but once he convinced me to shut up, pay attention, and actually try it for a couple of days, I was asking my parents for one. (They eventually gave me an HP-34C, which I loved ... and abused the power of, writing programs that took two or three days to run because hey, despite the lack of speed, I finally had a tool that'd do those things at all.)
When I got to college, started playing with the HP-3000 computer in BASIC, ForTran, and SPL, and then got access to the manuals that described the assembly language for it, I was tickled to realize that in important ways it was my calculator's big brother -- not only were the arithmetic operations all stack based, the part of the stack copied into hardware registers for speed was four words deep, just like the pocket calculator.
So I figured RPN was nice but quirky (I really liked the speed, of course, but thought it was just for people with brains wired like ,mine and a few other people) until I tried to write a program that would parse and evaluate infix expressions (trying to teach myself compiler design) and discovered that the easiest way to do so was to have it convert to RPN on the fly. That's when I decided RPN was more than merely "nice" and not quirky after all. But I still had people convinced I was setting up an ethnic joke when I tried to explain it. ("No, no, it's really called that. No, I didn't make it up...")
Prefix notation makes more sense to me intellectually as a math weenie -- it seems a more reasonable way to write math -- but when it comes to interactive usefulness, pushing buttons, it doesn't hold a candle to Reverse Polish. (At least for me.)
As for 1634, I'm not going to turn down such an offer ... I've registered "dglenn" as my Webscription userid. :-) I'm dying to see what happens next in that universe. Thanks.
Oh, bugger. Webscriptions seems to be lacking a proper gift giving mechanism. (Something I will be complaining about.) Apparantly, I need full access to the account to do that. (So much for surprise gifts.)
If you'd change your password to one you don't use anywhere else, and send it to me at lilla_pi@hotmail.com, I'll give you the book. *grumbling*
I liked 1632 and the sequels, since they were rather insightful and quite decently correct (except, in places, such as the rix dollars and the Swedish gentry, but Eric Flint don't mind retrofitting wihen he finds out how it really was). However, it amused me greatly that each grand pattern of European history was explained in great detail (see, the prince chose which religion his every subject should follow), but that the reader was presumed to know the personality traits of American presidents in detail. I hope this doesn't show the difference between our history educations.
Also, the engagement between Sharon and Hans amused me. First, Hans had his mother's ring? And had carried it through how many years of battle? Second, the whole ring thing is rather late. Swedish customs at the time, where the engagement rather than the wedding was the legal commitment, dictated no rings, except among the nobility. Rings (two for the engagement, one for the wedding) came later, and the whole stone bit is extremely new, only since the diamonds in South Africa were found. (I read up on that when we got engaged.) I don't think the German customs were different by much.
Your HP memories were a treat to read, and deserves an entry of their own!
(no subject)
By the way, if you have a Webscription account, I could always donate 1634: The Gallileo Affair.
(no subject)
He makes history as interesting to me as Parke Godwin does, though his scope is more ... sort of Asimovian in a way. And he makes politics as fascinating as The West Wing does (though again, with a different feel). And actually, while reading 1633 (and a bit in 1632) I did find myself wondering about reactions of European readers compared to my own reactions.
I too was exposed to RPN by way of HP in high school. I was skeptical when a friend tried to explain why his HP-29C was so much better than my TI-30, but once he convinced me to shut up, pay attention, and actually try it for a couple of days, I was asking my parents for one. (They eventually gave me an HP-34C, which I loved ... and abused the power of, writing programs that took two or three days to run because hey, despite the lack of speed, I finally had a tool that'd do those things at all.)
When I got to college, started playing with the HP-3000 computer in BASIC, ForTran, and SPL, and then got access to the manuals that described the assembly language for it, I was tickled to realize that in important ways it was my calculator's big brother -- not only were the arithmetic operations all stack based, the part of the stack copied into hardware registers for speed was four words deep, just like the pocket calculator.
So I figured RPN was nice but quirky (I really liked the speed, of course, but thought it was just for people with brains wired like ,mine and a few other people) until I tried to write a program that would parse and evaluate infix expressions (trying to teach myself compiler design) and discovered that the easiest way to do so was to have it convert to RPN on the fly. That's when I decided RPN was more than merely "nice" and not quirky after all. But I still had people convinced I was setting up an ethnic joke when I tried to explain it. ("No, no, it's really called that. No, I didn't make it up...")
Prefix notation makes more sense to me intellectually as a math weenie -- it seems a more reasonable way to write math -- but when it comes to interactive usefulness, pushing buttons, it doesn't hold a candle to Reverse Polish. (At least for me.)
As for 1634, I'm not going to turn down such an offer ... I've registered "dglenn" as my Webscription userid. :-) I'm dying to see what happens next in that universe. Thanks.
(no subject)
If you'd change your password to one you don't use anywhere else, and send it to me at lilla_pi@hotmail.com, I'll give you the book. *grumbling*
I liked 1632 and the sequels, since they were rather insightful and quite decently correct (except, in places, such as the rix dollars and the Swedish gentry, but Eric Flint don't mind retrofitting wihen he finds out how it really was). However, it amused me greatly that each grand pattern of European history was explained in great detail (see, the prince chose which religion his every subject should follow), but that the reader was presumed to know the personality traits of American presidents in detail. I hope this doesn't show the difference between our history educations.
Also, the engagement between Sharon and Hans amused me. First, Hans had his mother's ring? And had carried it through how many years of battle? Second, the whole ring thing is rather late. Swedish customs at the time, where the engagement rather than the wedding was the legal commitment, dictated no rings, except among the nobility. Rings (two for the engagement, one for the wedding) came later, and the whole stone bit is extremely new, only since the diamonds in South Africa were found. (I read up on that when we got engaged.) I don't think the German customs were different by much.
Your HP memories were a treat to read, and deserves an entry of their own!