TI-Basic 84 Programming/Introduction

Purpose

The purpose of this book is to teach both the basics and more advanced aspects of the TI-BASIC programming language. Although the book's intention is to instruct newcomers with no previous TI-Basic programming knowledge or experience, those who have some programming experience can use the table of contents to inform themselves on certain aspects of the language, like optimizing code or learning the small yet important differences between certain loop types. Hopefully, the Wiki Community can contribute a vast amount of useful TI-Basic programming knowledge, which will allow this book to provide a much more in-depth look at TI-Basic. Currently, this book only provides information regarding TI-BASIC programming on the TI-83+ or 84+. Of course, the Silver Editions and C or CE versions of the two calculators can be used with this guide.

To learn the language and programming skills in order from beginning to end, the reader should start with this page, the Introduction, and use the links at the bottom of each page to move to the next chapter.

Overview

TI-Basic is a simple programming language used on Texas Instruments (TI) graphing calculators which integrates many normal graphing calculator commands (like storing variables or graphing) into its code.

TI-Basic is a relatively easy language to program in, especially when it is compared with Assembly, the other main language that can be used to program TI graphing calculators. Programs written in TI-Basic, compared to programs written in Assembly, have a small filesize (due to that fact that commands like 'If ' and 'Menu(' use just 1-2 bytes of memory). However, this makes execution of TI-Basic programs very slow, because the calculator first reads through and parses each line of code before translating it into Assembly and executing it (in other words, it suffers from the same performance issues as any interpreted language). Despite its slow speed, the use of TI-Basic is appropriate for many simple programs.

Assumptions

This wikibook assumes that you have at least a partial understanding of the following concepts:

• What a programming language is
• Basic algebra
• Operation of a TI-84 calculator

Versions of TI-BASIC

The two main versions of TI-Basic in use today are TI-BASIC Z80, and TI-BASIC 68K. The "Z80" and "68K" refer to the processor that the calculator uses.

• TI-Basic Z80 comes on the TI-83, TI-83+, TI-83+ Silver Edition, TI-84+, TI-84+ Silver Edition, TI 84+ C, and TI-84 Plus CE calculators. It is the less powerful version of TI-Basic, but is still fairly versatile.
• TI-Basic 68K that comes on the TI-89, TI 89 Titanium, TI-92, TI-92 Plus and Voyage 200 calculators. It is the more powerful version of TI-Basic.

It is important to note that these two versions are very different. Z80 syntax is less strict than 68K, but 68K has many useful features like error handling.