Squirrel on your Nspire calculator
Posted by Xavier on 23 April 2016, 20:30 GMT
This time, let's talk about the TI-Nspire platform. Past notable third-party ports of standard languages to the Nspire are Micro Python and Duktape (JavaScript); we're now pleased to see another one being available, "Squirrel". Additional programming and scripting languages on calculators are usually exciting :)
Although less popular than Lua / Python / JS, Squirrel is also high-level, imperative, object-oriented, and has dynamic typing, exception handling, etc. - while maintaining a small footprint.
The TI-Nspire port by Eiyeron is called "nSquirrel", and features bindings to the n2DLib library for graphics operations. The performance isn't bad at all, as you can see from the animated screenshot.
For programmers and users, good documentation and examples are available.
In addition to handling ".nut" files for direct opening from the file explorer, you can also launch the interpreter itself to get an interactive session / REPL :)
As usual with such ports of standard languages, and more generally most programs nowadays, everything is open-source and available on GitHub, where you can submit bug reports, feature requests, etc. Have fun with nSquirrel!
