A Neighborhood of Infinity

I've just been reading this paper on caclulators.

Calculators are terrible. I own an HP48 and a TI83 and despite their incredible power I find them both horrible to use. The simplest of operations can take many keystrokes and despite using both of them for years I never reached a stage when I felt I was an experienced user. I always spend my time hunting for the next key to press. They both have a plethora of operating modes and many functions assigned to every key. I was so annoyed by all this recently that I went out and bought myself a simple 12ドル.99 Sharp calculator from Walgreens. While it's not a great calculator, if you want to do simple things it's much easier to use than the HP48 and TI83.

On the other hand, I miss RPN and 3 days ago I was reunited with my old HP32SII after 8 years. If you look on places like Ebay and Amazon you'll see that these machines are often sold used for over 100ドル despite being quite 'outdated' now. For most things this calculator is a joy to use. Even though I used it very little, and not having at all for the last 8 years, I was instantly able to dive into using much of the functionality very quickly. I still have a few complaints about it: with the 32SII HP had started playing with 'algebraic notation' side by side with RPN. This gives the calculator a bit of an inconsistent schizophrenic feel, especially when dealing with expressions ie. solving equations or computing integrals. It also has only a 4 level stack, a major shortcoming, especially when complex numbers take two stack entries each.

So I'm still waiting for the ultimate calculator to arrive. I've been tempted to build my own using a microcontroller, an FPGA and an LCD display - but I've been unable to find a cheap way to make my own keyboard.

Actually, what I'd really like is a pocket machine running Haskell...

UPDATE: I just got a HP42S for nothing. The size of a normal calculator, fairly uncluttered, yet with full support for graphics, complex matrices, equation solving and even sound.