Re:The Beautiful TI-108
by throwaway7645 on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @08:28PM
(#13991909)
It makes sense. If you're a scientist who has been using yours in the lab for 30+ years and one day it is ruined by the battery leaking all over the electronics, how much would you pay for a replacement? The new calculators are faster and the screens are better, but I'm surprised at the low build quality and how little features are actually available. Like why can't I run R or APL on my handheld calculator? I don't mean that strictly as the batteries wouldn't last long, but I should be able to do a variety of graphs and functions coupled with a language better than TI-Basic.
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Well, you can't expect desktop software to run on something with a few tens to hundreds of K of RAM. But basically all the TI graphing calculators can be programmed in C. I don't think anyone has bothered, but there's no reason at all you couldn't run APL on one, if you either wrote or found a lightweight enough implementation.
Re:The Beautiful TI-108
by throwaway7645 on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:48PM
(#13992252)
Yea I know there's no reason something like this doesn't exist, I just felt there would be a big enough market for something like that, but in my heart I know I'm very wrong:)
For what it's worth the version of Basic offered in the TI-89, TI-92, and Voyage 200 is probably the most interesting and powerful Basic ever released, anywhere; it supports symbolic math backed by a full CAS, declaration of pure functions, and a nifty feature that allows you to treat strings as variable names. Between that and the onboard C compiler I've never felt hog-tied, though I would love to see a practical Scheme system on one (there have been a few half-hearted attempts but "practical" is where it falls down).
Re:The Beautiful TI-108
by throwaway7645 on Thursday March 30, 2017 @11:38AM
(#13996300)
Scheme would be cool. Good point bout the language too.