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Kevin Ouellet · (This post was last modified: 03-18-2014 04:29 AM by Kevin Ouellet.)

(03-17-2014 02:04 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:
(03-17-2014 07:55 AM)debrouxl Wrote: I guess I stand corrected about BASIC on Nspire OS 1.1 - but then, which basic feature was missing from that version and only added several months later ?

Lionel, I'm not sure. Originally, the simple IF statement did not work as described in the manual, but that turned out to be a documentation problem and they updated the documentation. The program editor did not exist originally, if I recall correctly, and it was a real pain to enter a program (you couldn't press the ENTER or RETURN key until the last line of the program). I think it took them at least a year to get the program editor.

But the biggest initial deficiency, of course, was the lack of any interactive INPUT statement (interestingly, the original Dartmouth BASIC, THE very first BASIC, also lacked an INPUT statement in its initial release of May, 1964 [coming up on its 50th anniversary, BTW]; INPUT didn't arrive in Dartmouth BASIC until version 3, in 1966). Dartmouth BASIC lacked INPUT initially due mainly to hardware limitations. It was no secret that Nspire BASIC lacked INPUT because TI didn't want students playing games on it.

Seeing an older friend in grade 9 playing Tetris and some home-screen version of Snake on his TI-83+ is what convinced me of buying a TI-83+ graphing calculators. If programming what I want was impossible on that calc, I would not have seen any justification in spending $159.99 on a 83+ back in the days just to graph some equations, when I could have gotten a $49.99 Casio graphing calc or borrowed a TI-82 from school.

Games are not the main purpose of a graphing calculator, but I liked the freedom that calculator provided to me while still being useful for class, and since I could not afford a computer at the time, game programming was what convinced me of buying a calc instead of borrowing someone else's or buying a much cheaper one with less features but that can still get the school job done.