TI-BASIC

TI-BASIC is the official[1] name of a BASIC-like language built into Texas Instruments' graphing calculators.

Because TI graphing calculators are required for advanced mathematics classes in many high schools and universities, TI-BASIC often provides the first glimpse many students have into the world of programming.

The language itself has some basic structured programming capabilities, but makes limited to no use of or allowance for white space or indentation.

On the TI-83/84 models, closing parentheses, brackets, braces, and quotes can optionally be omitted at the end of a line or before the STO token in order to save space, although sometimes they are better left on.

The syntax for assignment (copying of data into a variable) is unusual with respect to most conventional programming languages for computers; rather than using a BASIC-like let statement with an equal sign, or an algol-like := operator, TI-BASIC uses a right-arrow sto→ operator with the syntax: source → destination.

Because Ans is reevaluated so frequently it most often is used to store very temporary calculations or to hold values that would otherwise be slow to access such as items from a list.

The 68k interpreter has a built in feature to store the number of space characters at the beginning of a line, this allows indentation.

The third-party libraries overload the sum(), real(), det() and identity() functions, which are handled and interpreted by their respective applications.

Among the extra functions are fast shape-drawing routines, sprite and tilemap tools, program and VAT modification and access abilities, GUI construction features, and much more, most of which are ordinarily restricted to use by assembly programmers.

All of the functions require that an application like Doors CS 7.0 be present on the user's calculator, sometimes considered a detraction to the use of the libraries.

Lists can be used by the numerous built-in TI-BASIC functions for calculating statistics, including various regression analyses and more.

[1] These can be called inside of programs, however they still show the info while pausing execution and they cannot store specific results into variables.

The format for computer-stored TI-BASIC programs generated by Texas Instruments' TI-GraphLink application was eventually decoded, and third-party tools were created to manipulate these files.

TI created a BASIC editor that they included in certain releases of the TI-GraphLink linking program, but it has not gained widespread usage.

In 2005, Joe Penna created OptiBASIC, a translator tool to convert text from the TI-GraphLink editor into standard Unicode.

[9] Independently, Christopher "Kerm Martian" Mitchell of Cemetech began creating an online converter to extract plain-text (and later HTML and BBCode-formatted) contents from tokenized TI-BASIC programs,[10] which expanded to include an online program editor, exporter, and TI-83 Plus emulator.

The interpreter uses standard input, output, error and specifiable log and configuration files in console mode under Windows, and a second programme to replicate the graphics used on the calculator would be related to it in the same way as the Tk tools which are integrated with Tcl, Perl, Rexx, C and other languages.

[15] A third tool which integrates the PC-side TI Basic with spreadsheet and database programmes via VBA and WSH engines is also envisioned.