Texas Instruments TI-92+, Tip List

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TI Basic can be used to add functional extensions to C or ASM programs which have reached the
24K ASM limit.
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TI Basic is extremely well documented. The user's guide thoroughly describes the language and
provides many examples. The user's guide is available in many languages as both a printed
document and an Acrobat PDF file. If this isn't enough, there are a few web tutorials to help you get
started.
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TI Basic is 'fast enough' for many real applications. This is certainly the case when the application
speed is bound by CAS or numeric operations, since both C and TI Basic use the same system
calls to perform these functions.
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TI Basic is reasonably complete and sophisticated.
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TI Basic is popular, so there is a large library of existing functions and programs you can use.
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TI Basic is similar to other Basic dialects, so a huge code resource is available in books, magazines
and web archives. It is trivial to translate programs from any version of Basic to TI Basic.
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Because of its popularity you can easily get help by posting on the TI discussion groups.
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TI Basic can be extended with assembler and C programs, to fill some of the more glaring
functional voids.
In spite of these advantages, there are several areas in which TI Basic could stand some improvement.
Loops are extremely slow. Debugging facilities are essentially nonexistent; programs cannot be
single-stepped and there are no breakpoints and no facilities for watching variables. TI Basic lacks
system function calls, although these can be accomplished with ASM program extensions.
Eric S. Raymond, in The Jargon Lexicon, version 4.3.1, gives this definition for BASIC:
BASIC /bay'-sic/ n.
A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing
system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage
in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A
Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to
students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the
cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an
educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on
the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b)
encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This
wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end
micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more, having acquired
Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]
BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". Earlier versions of
this entry claiming this was a later backronym were incorrect.
Mr. Raymond finds it necessary (or at least amusing) to include Edsger Dijkstra's hoary quote with the
memorable phrase 'mentally mutilated'. Even so, it is possible to write clear, coherent maintainable
code in BASIC, just as it is possible to code a convoluted mess in C++ or Perl. Regardless, TI Basic is
what we have on the calculator, so it may be more productive to make the best of the situation rather
than moan about its deficiencies.
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