Little explorations with HP calculators (no Prime)

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(03-16-2018 09:10 PM)pier4r Wrote:  So now I have also to check whether ti basic/casio basic have indirect calls.

The Casios don't. Since you've asked this elsewhere too: No timing functions either. The incredibly limited programming language is one of the reasons my Casios haven't seen much use since your benchmark project 5 1/2 years ago. (Well, the AFX is dead anyway, but the 9750G+ is still operational. It's been on loan to my sister for school, but she's kind of the polar opposite of me regarding math affinity, so I fully expect its memory to be in the state I left it in.) The 50g simply beats them in pretty much any respect, except maybe in the category "working the way clueless lazy math-hating pupils expect it to". But again, it even has an algebraic mode for those...

The Casios limit labels to 38 per program (0-9, A-Z, r, theta), which can only be directly called with a Goto command. There is a Prog command to call other programs (only directly by name, and programs cannot be written or read by other programs), but the return stack is limited to about 10 levels, making it mostly useless. Most variables are limited to real or complex numbers (this includes all 28 regular global variables, the cells in matrices and lists, and the special-purpose variables for statistics, graphing, and so on). Starting from OS version 2.0 for the 9860 series, there are 20 string variables, but the string processing commands are quite limited (notably, no parsing is possible). The closest you can get to passing programs around is by using one of the 20 graphing function slots (Y=, r=, Xt=/Yt=, depending on coordinate mode: Cartesian, Polar, Parametric) or one of the 6 (up to CFX series, which includes my 9750G+, but not the 9860-based 9750GII) or 20 (starting from AFX) general function slots (tucked away in one of the last submenus of the OPTN menu, try finding that without help) to hold your formula. Those forbid command separators, though (newline, colon, and the little triangle that displays the result of the preceding command, waiting for EXE to be pressed), and many commands are also forbidden inside these (including Goto and Prog ).
Did I mention that there are NO local variables? Yeah, that's right. It's not so bad when your programs always initialize their stuff on startup, but when you start thinking about persistent storage, the nightmares about finding variables not used in any other program will begin.
While I'm ranting, I might just mention that spaces outside strings cause syntax errors. No code indenting for you! At least the no-empty-commands rule has been relaxed, so starting from the AFX series double newlines are acceptable.

I don't know much about TIs, having never wielded one, but I'd assume they're just marginally better. I just know that after the simple ASM programmability of many older series, on the NSpire there's a war raging between the community exploiting flaws to run native code (which spawns cool stuff, check out Ndless), and the company using 2048-bit RSA bootloader-validated (can't change that, it's in true ROM) signatures for their firmware, downgrade-locks and other drastic measures to suppress native code execution, for fear that it might be used to bypass the exam mode and therefore get the calculators banned on exams. Casio and HP seem much less concerned at least.