If you're taking math or science courses, you'll most likely only be allowed to use a handheld calculator on exams. When you're on your own, you're better off using something like Python.

“That’s right, that friendly snake can now do your math homework with you ... online store where the NumWorks Graphing Calculator integrated Python interpreter is now available to purchase ...

Admittedly, slide rules don’t really have RPN, but you work problems on them the same way you do with an RPN calculator ... it is an easy way to express math without ambiguity.

That was [gnebehay’s] thought when his university studies were too high level, so he decided to write an arithmetic expression parser in Python. It came out in about 100 lines of code.

Python is convenient and flexible, yet notably slower than other languages for raw computational speed. The Python ecosystem has compensated with tools that make crunching numbers at scale in ...