Re: TI or HP?

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Re: TI or HP?

On Wed, 1 Oct 1997 10:26:29 -0400, "Wilson, M. CPT C&ME"
<im1077@EXMAIL.USMA.ARMY.MIL> wrote:

>One thing I do dispute is the types of programs out there for Ti calcs.
>The vast majority of programs for Ti calcs appear to be games.  Ti's are
>user friendly, but they certainly can't do everything well for serious
>work.  A good example is Fargo for the Ti-92.  How many serious work
>programs or utilities have come out for Fargo compared to the nifty
>games?  Has anyone worked on a Fargo routine to make up for the
>absolutely horrible linear algebra (matrix math) native Ti-92 routines?
>Or how about a high speed units converter?  Perhaps if people stopped
>trying to build a better "Pong" and started building a base of real
>world serious programs the Ti family would be looked on as more than
>high school toys.

You have to understand that programming games in assembly is a LOT
easier than programming math programs (and of course more fun hehe).
Since TI doesn't support 92 asm, we know practically nothing how
standard floating point math routines work on the 92. If someone wants
to make a math program, he either has to limit it to integers or make
own floating point operation routines. And if you want to make a
short math program in asm, you will most likely want to pass
parameters to it, and then you would need to understand the format
of expressions etc.

However, I believe that there will be more math programs for the 83
and especially the 86 than for other calcs since TI supports asm.
They have already released a lot of information about floating point
numbers, how to use the operations in the ROM etc. The user
won't have to program those parts himself, which is needed when
programming math stuff for Fargo for instance.


Jimmy Merdell <mja@algonet.se>
http://www.algonet.se/~mja
IRC: Yarin
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