TI-Basic Z80 Programming

This book covers the Z80 processor's version of TI-BASIC.

Illustration of a TI-84 Plus

Overview

TI-BASIC is a simple programming language used on Texas Instruments (TI) graphing calculators. The language is quite simple, and integrates many normal graphing calculator commands (such as storing variables or graphing) into its code.

TI-BASIC is very easy to program, especially when compared to assembly, which is the other main language that can be used to program TI graphing calculators. Also, programs written in TI-BASIC can have small file sizes, since common functions can be programmed with just one character (1-2 bytes), such as If or Menu(. However, this makes execution of TI-BASIC programs very slow, since each line of code must be read and parsed before execution. Despite the crawling speed of TI-BASIC, it's appropriate for many simple programs.

Versions of TI-BASIC

There are two main versions of TI-BASIC in use today:

• The TI-BASIC that comes with the TI-89, TI 89 Titanium, TI-92, TI-92 Plus and Voyage 200 calculators. This is the more powerful version of TI-BASIC.

• The TI-BASIC that comes with the TI-83, TI-83+, TI-83+ Silver Edition, TI-84+ and TI-84+ Silver Edition calculators. This is a less powerful version of TI-BASIC, but is still fairly versatile. This Wikibook covers this version.

Please note that within these two versions of TI-BASIC, there are slight variations.

Table of Contents

This table of contents arranges the sections in the best order possible for those who are trying to learn the language. However, if you are already familiar with TI-BASIC, you may decide to skip certain sections.

1. Introduction - What this book covers and how to read it
2. Necessary Items - What you need to begin programming
3. Hello, World! - How to write your first program
4. Basic Variables - How to use reals, strings, and lists
5. Output - How to display values and strings to the screen
6. Input - How to get and use user input
7. Conditional Statements - How to dynamically change the program
8. Loops - How to repeat sections of code
9. Advanced Variables - How to use other variable types
10. GetKey - How to use precise user input via keypresses
11. Goto and Lbl - How to jump to different sections in code
12. Menus - Display several options for user selection
13. Errors - How to handle when a program encounters an error
14. Tips, Tricks and Optimizations - Use these tricks to reduce your code's footprint
15. Advanced Programming - How to apply advanced tricks to your program
16. Programming Games - How program simple games
17. Appendix A: List of Commands

External Links

Learning and Programming TI-BASIC

Here are the manuals that come with TI calculators from the Texas Instruments website, which can be used to learn TI-BASIC.

• TI 83 (See Chapter 16)
• TI 83 Plus (See Chapter 16)
• TI 83 Plus Silver Edition (See Chapter 16)
• TI 84 Plus (See Chapter 16)
• TI 84 Plus Silver Edition (See Chapter 16)
• TI 89 (See Chapter 17)
• TI 89 Titanium (See Chapter 18)
• TI 92 Plus (See Chapter 17)
• Voyage 200 (See Chapter 18)