#ti-basic

a part of ti-basic programs i really admire is how unreadable they are. no-indentation, the 1-letter variables, the common exclusion of comments, its amazing; the core mindset of ti-basic is to hammer something out in 5 hours and to never look back. anyway, i spend a little time to annotate that MINEsweeper program.

it honestly feels weird for a ti-basic program to be this readable

I may or may not have spent the past hour looking through my TI 83 Plus Silver calculator from high school, which was my introduction to the world of programming.  Keep in mind I had no reference or guidance whatsoever, I didn’t even have the manual or bother to look things up online.

In looking through all the code I wrote, which are either programs that did the “busy” work in my Math classes or mostly incomplete games that are based entirely on chance or navigating menus in the correct order, I have noticed that my thoughts can be summarized as one of two things:

“Wow, I can’t believe I was able to figure this out.”

“I can’t believe I did it like this.”

For example, I wrote a program that evaluated a functions integral using Simpson’s and the Trapezoid rules.  I’m impressed that I was able to figure out how to reference the function that was loaded into memory and use GOTO statements correctly (or as correctly as one can use them at least)

Another example is from a game I worked on for probably 3 years in high school.  I had a very crude password system (with each character sored in variables W, O, R, D) and evaluated if a password was correct by doing: IF W=4 and O=2 and R=9 and D=1; GOTO PA; IF W=5 and O=1 and R=7 and D=8; GOTO PB; ... IF W!=4 or 5... and O!=2 or 1... DISPLAY "You don't know what you're talking about you fool!";