On: A terminal case of Linux

[somat]

Unfortunately we will never get rpn taught in schools so it will always feel unnatural and weird to many people.

what is unnatural is the complicated case specific precedence rules mid notation requires. rpn still has precedence rules but because they are simple it appears that there are none and because they are universal there is no confusion as to where any new operators fit in.

I wonder if anybody has ever written a linguistic history of math notation and how it ended up the way it did.

[ajuc → somat]

Maybe it's just what I'm used to, but doing anything other than calculating the value of an expression with RPN seems hard to me.

    (x-3)(x+2)-8 > 2x^2+3
    x^2-x-8 > 2x^2+3
    x^2+x+8 < -3
    x^2+x+11 < 0

vs

    x 3 - x 2 + * 8 - x x * 2 * 3 + >

how would I simplify the expressions here? Maybe it's possible without transforming to infix but I can't do it.