In regards to 'gimme useful programs...'

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In regards to 'gimme useful programs...'

Over the years that I have been on this list There have been numerous
messages saying:  "I'm taking ________ please send me useful programs"  I
would just like to add a few comments from personal experience.  Many of
the programs I have written to do calculations, check answers, etc.  for
my classes have been specific to certain types of problems.  Therefore,
for most people my programs are pretty useless, except for seeing the
algoriothms used in order to implement them in their own programs.  For
instance, if someone wanted to check their answers for a problem, I
believe the way to do this with maximize their learning is to write the
program themselves.  Here is a simple example: Find the lcm and gcd of a
pair of numbers.  I know the TI-85 (and probably the 82, 83, and 92 as
well) has fuctions that will output these two numbers, however,  writing
one's own program to calculate these numbers has its advantages.  It not
only teaches programing, but also gives one more practicwe doing the
calculations they need to be doing anyway.  I know of at least two
different alorithms for each of the above tasks and I believe they are
all different than the alorithm used by TI.  Granted a program written in
TI-basic will be much slower than anything in th ROM, but the pactice of
writing the program is still well worth the effort and the wait.  I did
something similar to this when I first was exposed to linear
regressions.  I wrote a program to calculate the slope, y-intercept, and
correlation coefficient for two lists of data.  A few lears later, I wanted
to write a program to solve some problems that required linear
regressions of many different lists, and all I had to do was copy about
six lines of code into my new program and change the variable names.  In
this case my program was quicker than using the ROM routine because the
program would do all the necesasary switching from list to list.


__________________________
John Logan
n9342326@henson.cc.wwu.edu