Talk:Parsing/RPN calculator algorithm

Graduation to task

This seems to be a task that is well understood and which is attracting implementations from many different types of languages. Is there any reason to not graduate it to a full task now? –Donal Fellows 12:27, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Several programming examples are treating the input as characters instead of tokens, and this is working because there are no multi-digit numbers, and no numbers that contain a decimal point, and no numbers that are expressed in exponential notation (such as 3E27), and no numbers that have a leading sign, and no multi-character operands (such as **), etc. Should those programs be considered incorrect? (Just because they come up with the correct answer, doesn't make it correct. Hurrumph!) -- Gerard Schildberger 23:56, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Extraneous Requirements

It seems to me that the requirement that one "shows the changes in the stack as each individual token is processed as a table" is entirely extraneous to the core task of parsing and calculating RPN expressions. I think the inclusion of this kind of extraneous printing requirement goes against the principle mission of Rosetta code. For reasons outlined in Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Extraneous Printing Requirements in Tasks, I think we should make this requirement optional. If no one objects after several days, I will make this minor change. --Abathologist (talk) 04:09, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Could you elaborate on your thinking? (Note also that you linked to a page which does not exist. Does this mean that you are just making this up?) --Rdm (talk) 04:28, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out my linking error. I have corrected it. (Funny that you'd think I was making it up rather than messing up the link!) I elaborate my reasoning pretty extensively on the linked page, and I'd be happy to add further details or clarifications here! Please ask if you have any questions! Either way, I look forward to your feedback. --Abathologist (talk) 09:59, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

I asked because I had never seen that page before, and was not familiar with it. But ok, it looks like you created it not too long ago. (So... it still sort of looks to me like you were making it up...)

That said, I agree with some of the sentiments you express there. And it's apparent that you put some thought into this and are trying to grapple with a real issue.

That said, I also have some sympathy for people interested in seeing intermediate results. Intermediate results, after all, are sometimes a valid thing to want to see.

So... my current impression is that this might be a task labelling issue as much as anything else: if the task is about requiring some sort of logging or tracing of an algorithm, it should be named that (to allow the unadorned name to be used for implementations of the unadorned algorithm).

I should probably wait for others to weigh in on this? (Assuming they notice and/or care.) Maybe the right place to start, though, would be to pick one particularly egregious example page, and split it into two copies - one with the logging requirements and the other without? --Rdm (talk) 17:26, 20 September 2016 (UTC)