So, they really DO things differently in Texas...
As I mentioned earlier I am the recipient of a shiny new Ti89 and have been trying to get to know it. My main pocket calculator for [ahem] years, bought when I was studying for my M.Sc., was a Casio fx-3600P and I could use it almost blindfolded. If I had to make the leap from that one to the Ti89 I would be struggling as back in the days of yore calculators appeared to be more stack-based and so pressing <SIN> would give you the sine of the value on the display. Due to the LCD-leaking death of the fx-3600P I acquired a fx-115W with much the same capabilities but, being more than a decade newer, it now used what Casio modestly called Super Visually Perfect Algebraic Method which means you have to type everything like it appears in the textbook, or suffer painfully (thank goodness for some basic editing options). The Ti89 is like this, only more so. The main gotcha I have encountered so far is that unary minus has a lower priority than almost all other operations(!) Bizarre! When looking at a negative number I expect it to be atomic but the Ti89 treats the sign as some kind of function and it fails the dictum of least surprises as it is not followed by a parenthesis, like most of the other built-in functions. When you stare in wonderment after entering -3^2 and seeing the answer -9 you immediately have that sinking feeling that whole new vistas of misinterpretation and debugging are opening up. Is there any other language or machine that treats a unary minus in this manner?