Mile
Zero

In a fit of nostalgia, I've been trying to get my hands on a TI-82 calculator for a few weeks now. TI BASIC was probably the first programming language in which I actually wrote significant amounts of code: although a few years later I'd start working in C for PalmOS and Windows CE, I have a lot of memories of trying to squeeze programs for speed and size during slow class periods. While I keep checking Goodwill for spares, there are plenty of TI calculator emulation apps, so I grabbed one and loaded up a TI-82 ROM to see what I've retained.

Actually, TI BASIC is really weird. Things I had forgotten:

• You can type in all-caps text if you want, but most of the time you don't, because all of the programming keywords (If, Else, While, etc.) are actually single "character" glyphs that you insert from a menu.
• In fact, pretty much the only code that's typed manually are variable names, of which you get 26 (one for each letter). There are also six arrays (max length 99), five two-dimensional matrices (limited by memory), and a handful of state variables you can abuse if you really need more. Everything is global.
• Variables aren't stored using =, which is reserved for testing, but with a left-to-right arrow operator: value → dest I imagine this clears up a lot of ambiguity in the parser.
• Of course, if you're processing data linearly, you can do a lot without explicit variables, because the result of any statement gets stored in Ans. So you can chain a lot of operations together as long as you just keep operating on the output of the previous line.
• There's no debugger, but you can hit the On key to break at any time, and either quit or jump to the current line.
• You can call other programs and they do return after calling, but there are no function definitions or return values other than Ans (remember, everything is global). There is GOTO, but it apparently causes memory leaks when used (thanks, Dijkstra!).

I'd romanticized it over time — the self-contained hardware, the variable-juggling, the 1-bit graphics on a 96x64 screen. Even today, I'm kind of bizarrely fascinated by this environment, which feels like the world's most cumbersome register VM. But loading up the emulator, it's obvious why I never actually finished any of my projects: TI BASIC is legitimately a terrible way to work.

In retrospect, it's obviously a scripting language for a plotting library, and not the game development environment I wanted it to be when I was trying to build Wolf3D clones. You're supposed to write simple macros in TI BASIC, not full-sized applications. But as a bored kid, it was a great playground, and the limitations of the platform (including its molasses-slow interpreter) made simple problems into brainteasers (it's almost literally the challenge behind TIS-100).

These days, the kids have it way better than I did. A micro:bit is cheaper and syncs with a phone or computer. A Raspberry Pi is a real computer of its own, as is the average smartphone. And a laptop or Chromebook with a browser is miles more productive than a TI-82 could ever be. On the other hand, they probably can't sneak any of those into their trig classes and get away with it. And maybe that's for the best — look how I turned out!