Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

Like many here, I can attribute where I am in life today largely to TI calculator programming. I made many friends on Cemetech with whom I still keep in touch, including a few named in this article.

I racked up thousands of posts on the Cemetech and United TI forums and spent countless hours hanging out in the game Blockland which was also popular among those folks in the mid 2000s.

To me, one of the most impressive folks in this list is calc84maniac, who joined the scene a year or two after me, but quickly surpassed me in skill, becoming a z80 ASM whiz at the age of ~13 or so, whereas some of the other (very talented) folks were at least STEM university students.

I know a few people in this article such as SirCmpwn are on HN, too, so hopefully they chime in this thread.

Some of the most memorable things about programming in BASIC on these calculators were the absurd constraints. Your whole program was limited to a few kilobytes. You only had 27 floating point variables, a few lists of floats with a maximum length of 999, no real functions or stack or anything, etc. You’d shave bytes by taking advantage of syntactical quirks that the interpreter happened to accept, like not closing parentheses at the end of a line.

I don’t have much of value to add other than expressing some serious nostalgia.

>Your whole program was limited to a few kilobytes. You only had 27 floating point variables, a few lists of floats with a maximum length of 999, no real functions or stack or anything, etc. You’d shave bytes by taking advantage of syntactical quirks that the interpreter happened to accept, like not closing parentheses at the end of a line.

I found that smaller programs just ran faster. So I took one I'd written to convert from ASCII strings to binary strings and back. Yes, there's a built in function to do this, but it's very limited. Mine used string representations and so the only limits were memory...Then I changed all the variables to single letters to save space...and rendering the code completely indecipherable in the process.

Learning the hard way that "human readable code" is very important at a very young age.

One reason for this was that GOTO was a main control structure in TI-BASIC (since it lacked user-definable functions), and AFAIK on hitting a GOTO, the interpreter scanned the program from top to bottom to find the corresponding Label. So it was very easy to write loops than ran in O(program size). This was strong motivation to learn how to use While and For loops.

Huh, I am too young to have messed with Ti-84 programming, but what you described sounds extreemly similar to my experience programing in YOLOL the ingame/inworld programming language in the game starbase.

In this language you are limited to 120 characters per line, and 20 lines with .2 second execution time for a single line in a "chip" (the devices that store and execute code ingame). Only very basic operations are availible, like goto, if, and math operations.

You basically end up code golfing to squeeze as much as possible into those 120 characters, to minimize latency and use fewer chips (which have in-world costs) its been a fun experience so far.

I wonder if the developers were inspired by the similar Ti-84 programming limits

Ah, the days of rearranging code so you could take advantage of the special Ans variable being faster to access…

TIL Ans is faster. Holy crap is this info coming to me too late; all of my programs could have been so much better.

So I pulled out my TI-85 just now to benchmark this. It seems that the access is very close the same speed, but the implicit store is a bit more than 20% faster than storing to a named variable.

I never did manage to learn z80 asm in high school, but I have very fond memories of programming an RPG all through high school, and playing a lot of tetris and mario.

I was in 12th grade when Axe Parser came up! That was an excellent project.

Me too! Programming my TI-84+ in 2006 was the first programming I ever did. Geez, reading the article though, things have changed a lot...

Hey, that's about the same time that I had the same experience! I never wrote anything super complicated, but it got me interested enough to choose a Computer Engineering major when I applied to college.

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