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Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

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Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

#51

Post by chainingsolid »

freedomben wrote: post #28
nzoschke wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s me with a TI-85 in 7th grade in ‘95 or so. It was effectively a portable computer that I was allowed to use and play with in most classes. Started with TI-BASIC, then discovered ticalc.org and the shell and assembly programming hacks, games, and home brew transfer cables. It effectively started my electrical engineering and computer science career. I know I’m not alone.

Indeed, +1. I was the same though with a TI-83 instead. I had to get good at hiding the calculator under the desk in non-math classes because the English teacher (for example) would press me on "why do you need a calculator for English class?" I'm kicking myself for not saving the game code I wrote for some of those early games. They weren't very good, but I'd love to see the code, despite the horrifying spaghetti th…

Almost identical boat here. Had a borrowed TI-83, freshman year wrote 2048 && 1/2 of chess with only knowing basic variable usage, if, goto, and matrix indexing. Found out about actual loops and the ability to call a basic program from another latter.

Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

#52

Post by chainingsolid »

le-mark wrote: post #11
submeta wrote: post #6

There‘s HP calculator guys and TI guys. Around the age of 17 I spent lots of time programming my HP28s calculator in a Forth like language that had symbolic mathematics, lots of ideas from Scheme (closures, functions as first class arguments, recursion). It felt like magic dealing with concepts I hadn’t seen in the C compiler on my Amiga or later in Turbo Pascal. But I saw these concepts later in Mathematica and was…

Most if not all high schools and colleges in the US required TI “graphing” calculators for algebra/trig on up. I don’t know if they still do. I never saw this HP28, sounds awesome!

I remember one of my math teachers claiming only TI showed up to the math text book meetings or something like that, so guess what calculator the book recommends...

Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

#53

Post by pavel_lishin »

Dwedit wrote: post #37

The Basic was SO BAD that I had to learn Z80 assembly to make anything good. Really. No sane Basic should leak stack memory just because you exited an "If-Then" block without reaching the corresponding "End". Yes that's a thing. If you use "If-Then" and the code never reaches the "End" because you used "Goto" to leave the block, a few bytes are leaked every time that happens, and eventually the program stops with "ER…

Yep. It was an incredibly constrained environment, which honestly made me feel so happy when I got things to work well :)

I wonder if I still have my minesweeper program on my old calculators.

Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

#55

Post by dack »

this was definitely me in high school. i still fondly remember the day when we could use our Ti-83+ for our exam but we had to show the teacher that we cleared memory for notes and formulas.

So i wrote a program that just made it look like I cleared memory and it worked like a charm.

I don't remember if I even stored anything that could be constituted cheating but it was more about the satisfaction of knowing I outsmarted them, heh.

Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

#56

Post by dlevine »

nzoschke wrote: post #17
z_open wrote: post #3

It's funny how many software developers got into it due to being bored in class with a TI-83 and randomly trying to create programs.

That’s me with a TI-85 in 7th grade in ‘95 or so. It was effectively a portable computer that I was allowed to use and play with in most classes. Started with TI-BASIC, then discovered ticalc.org and the shell and assembly programming hacks, games, and home brew transfer cables. It effectively started my electrical engineering and computer science career. I know I’m not alone.

I had a TI-81 (and then an 85 later on). I wrote a blackjack program. There was no link cable for the 81, so other kids had to type it in manually.

Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

#59

Post by kyleperik »

Lots of stories about being bored in class and making programs, so I thought I'd share mine.

The functions feature allow you to define and graph equations with x and y. Well other variables also factor in including program defined variables such as z. That enables 3d orthographic graphs to be drawn.

Then I took it a step further and translated the results into a matrix and used that data to make real 3d projections of my graphs (or other shapes)

A bit serendipitous as my father just gave me back the calculator I used, I will be passing that down to my kids.

Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

#60

Post by z_open »

cube00 wrote: post #49
matt_kantor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was me. Algebra clicked for me so I found the pace of the class to be slow. Ended up creating a few programs to solve tedious things like the quadratic formula incrementally while displaying the intermediate steps so I could write them down on tests. Authoring programs using the buttons on the calculator was not fun.

> so I could write them down on tests. We had show our calculator had been memory wiped before any tests. Although in retrospect we only had to show the wipe screen which we probably could have coded up as its own program.

Most teachers were not good at checking this. There was an archive mechanism which would compress the file and IIRC, prevent it from showing up in the program list. You could of course just unarchive it.
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