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Unix history and the `dc` calculator
An elegant weapon for a more civilized age; or, why RPN is the coolest thing since sliced silicon.
You may even know that there's a dedicated UNIX utility, bc, which can do the exact same thing, and can run interactively, or with piped input, or a script. If you write a naïve program reading symbols and doing operations for infix notation, you'll quickly wind up tripping over expressions like \(3 + 4 \times 9 + 2\). Since that time, all manner of calculators and computers, desktop, handheld, or otherwise, have used RPN as the input scheme because it is efficient and unambiguous.
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