Firstly, as someone who did become interested in programming through the TI83, and as someone who web on to do a Computer Science degree in university, I have to say that I love and prefer the new programming language that is on the TI-Nspire calculators. Why? Well, I feel that it gives the students interested in programming a much better sense of what real coding is like. The Nspire language is much closer to the "standard" languages of Java and C in terms of syntax. It is also easier to teach good coding practices such as indentation and naming conventions. The library capabilities promote modulization, code efficiency, procedural calls, reuse of code, and also removes from view cryptic files like "thetaABC" which is a subroutine for a single program you rarely use.
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>
The rest is a matter of opinion, you are entitled to yours, I have a
different one; but:
- how is centering a product in standardized testing, that students in
most countries need to take, ignoring students?
- how is Prizm such a better choice if in your own words its "BASIC
interpreter is painfully slow"?
- how is it that when the programming community got around the
limitations and hacked the Nspire and built Ndless, a gameboy emulator
and gameboy game ports were amongst the first things to be developped?
I see very little effort in creating "student oriented" applications
and a lot of effort in creating more and more ports of games, 1st
person shooters, rpgs, etc.
- how is it that TI calculators have such a high importance in
learning how to program, being in C, assembly or whatever language,
and yet I never heard of any university computer programming courses
that use calculators (and I know more than a few). I'm sorry, I fail
to see where that importance lies.
- how is it that with all that non existant programming power on the
Nspire rich content has been created with little or no programming at
all? I never complained about Nspire's lack of programming power.
Instead, I built a Periodic Table and a 3D geometry application
amongst many others (feel free to download them, they're at
www.nelsonsousa.pt). You may also see the works of Steve Arnold, Marc
Garneau, John Hanna, Sean Bird and others and see what kind of thing
that crippled programming allows us to do when we think out of the box
for a moment and start to build instead of complaining.
From what I hear, although I never tried one, the Prizm seems to be a
great calculator. So is the Nspire.
Cheers,
Nelson
> Your editorial claims as facts things are are just not true:
> - TI is a monopoly: maybe so in the US, not as such in other parts of
> the world. I don't know current exact figures but, and although TI is,
> to the best of my knowledge, the market leader on most European
> countries, the market is much more balanced and Casio is the leader in
> some countries;
Well, TI has been the market leader for a long time, and behaves, in
some ways, as a monopoly...
One easy example is mistreatment of users, which TI "can" afford because
they're a monopoly. They don't even feel like fixing bugs that yield
incorrect results, crash the calculator in normal operation and break
programs.
Several 10+-year-old bugs remain on both the TI-68k series and the
TI-Z80 series. And they even add bugs to the pile: OS 2.53MP for 84+
breaks programs and crash the calculator in normal operation; 2.55MP
adds marginal new functionality, expands the PTT mode, and does not
fix the most troublesome bug. That's a big fat middle finger sent
to us customers.
> - Prizm's superior specs: 116MHz CPU underclocked to run at 58 Mhz, 16
> Mb of ROM and 62 Mb of RAM (I assume this was a typo and you meant
> 62Mb or 61Mb depending on how you count) ? Nspire's CPU is running at
> some 100 MHz, the CX has 100Mb total storage space, 64 Mb RAM. How is
> Prizm superior? LCD: the form factor is different, Nspire's is higher,
> Prizm's is wider; the Prizm has a higher number of pixels by 10%; and
> they tie in number of colors, 65k for both. Except in number of pixels
> I don't see the advantage for Prizm on the specs alone, unlike what
> you claim.
I fail to see where you read, in Christopher's message, a statement
about the Prizm having specs superior _to the Nspire (CX)'s specs_ ?
And it's a fact that the Prizm has specs superior to the TI-Z80 series,
the TI-68k series, and most (if not all) Casio calc series - which is
truly (and obviously - Christopher _does_ know the hardware specs of
the Nspire) what he was comparing the Prizm to, on the hardware specs
front.
> The rest is a matter of opinion, you are entitled to yours, I have a
> different one; but:
> - how is centering a product in standardized testing, that students in
> most countries need to take, ignoring students?
I suggest you, and everybody else, to browse the "we made it to XKCD"
discussion again,
https://groups.google.com/group/tinspire/browse_thread/thread/2978472efdd30e01/
More precisely for this paragraph:
"
(Ross)
> Well, I haven't fully read every reply so far, so I hope that this
> hasn't already been said, but I have a simple solution that TI
> could/should have used when they first released the TI-Nspire:
> Allow for their to be ASM/Flash/C programs on the calculator, but
> turn off that functionality in the Press to Test mode.
(myself)
Indeed, I think that most agree that this would have been a good middle
ground between L's and Cs, in -TJ's terminology.
"
The Nspire (CAS) (CX) is precisely _too_ centered on standardized
testing... Capping the functionality in _normal operation mode_ to a
sub-par BASIC is not good, in the opinion of many members of the open
development community.
It's highly unlikely that we'd be currently discussing if the Nspire
had
1) a normal operation mode with proper BASIC programming, including
I/O functions that have been built in many programmable graphing
calculators for 15+ years but have been missing from the Nspire since
the beginning;
2) a testing mode, where this capability _can_ be disabled in case
someone feels that it's really important to disable it.
> - how is Prizm such a better choice if in your own words its "BASIC
> interpreter is painfully slow"?
Perhaps slow is better than none ?
The Prizm does have the I/O functions that TI remains unwilling to
provide.
> - how is it that when the programming community got around the
> limitations and hacked the Nspire and built Ndless, a gameboy emulator
> and gameboy game ports were amongst the first things to be developped?
> I see very little effort in creating "student oriented" applications
> and a lot of effort in creating more and more ports of games, 1st
> person shooters, rpgs, etc.
IIRC, you already raised this point in a previous discussion, and I
already showed why things are that way...
Remember: games, as a special case of programs that don't _require_
integration and intaction with the OS, are obviously _much_ easier to
do without official documentation than math programs.
Once you know how to write to the screen, read from the keyboard, and
read/write some files (for the program loader), you're set for games.
Not so for math programs, and obviously so ;)
On both the TI-68k and TI-Z80 platforms, besides third-party reverse-
engineering (which began before TI's help for TI-68k calcs and TI-Z80
calcs), TI released, more than ten years ago, some documentation about
a number of system variables, data structures and system calls
(BCALLs, ROM_CALLs) for manipulating math data / expressions.
Let's be honest, TI's documentation, even if incomplete, helped both
normal usage and further reverse-engineering.
On TI-68k/AMS, TI even gradually expanded the feature set accessible
to C/ASM programs - even if they forgot, or neglected, to export some
of them that are arguably useful (e.g., but not limited to, push_xor,
push_arclen, push_trig_expand, push_trig_collect, all AMS 2.08+
auxiliary trig functions) as ROM_CALLs.
See https://github.com/debrouxl/gcc4ti/commits/next-doc .
On the Nspire platform, TI has released nothing, and it's extremely
hard to find the necessary information by ourselves, since reverse-
engineering an OS as huge as the Nspire OS is, is *much* harder than
reverse-engineering the TI-Z80 OS and the TI-68k OS.
You can keep complaining about the making of C/ASM games instead of
C/ASM math programs, but it's very easy to explain, and the blame lies
with the manufacturer. And we'll keep rebutting you.
> - how is it that TI calculators have such a high importance in
> learning how to program, being in C, assembly or whatever language,
> and yet I never heard of any university computer programming courses
> that use calculators (and I know more than a few). I'm sorry, I fail
> to see where that importance lies.
You're completely missing the point - once again ;)
As Christopher outlined in a later mail:
"and the TI-83/84+ series gave students who wouldn't otherwise have
exposure to any programming classes or tools something with which to
experiment."
We're obviously not talking about university students, because for
those, as you certainly know, in a number of countries, calculator is
an under-used tool at best, a forbidden tool in tests at worst.
We're talking about high-schoolers.
Christopher, I and thousands of others who now make programs for a
living, got their first exposure to programming on calculators - or
at least, used them as a transportable tool on which they started
programming on a regular basis.
The calculators were mostly TI calcs, since 1) they're the market
leader and (*because*, in fact) 2) their calcs used to be more
programmable and moddable than the contemporary Casio models, and
easier to use, in the opinion of many persons, than HP's 48-49 series.
I'll grant you that this aspect is becoming less important nowadays,
because students have now more platforms in their reach than they
had ten years ago (smartphones, netbooks, etc).
However, older calculator models are bringing an aspect that keeps
being important, even with the increase in computational power:
efficiency and programming in native(ly-compiled) languages.
> - how is it that with all that non existant programming power on
> the Nspire rich content has been created with little or no
> programming at all?
Please quit being silly and behave as a grown-up...
We're not saying that there's "non existant programming power on
the Nspire", because that's *obviously* not true. We're saying that
it's sub-par compared to most programmable graphing calculators
released in the past 15+ years, and that this is bad for some
reasons, even if it's not as bad as it could have been 5-10 years
ago, as I outlined in my previous paragraph.
> I never complained about Nspire's lack of programming power.
> Instead, I built a Periodic Table and a 3D geometry application
> amongst many others (feel free to download them, they're at
> www.nelsonsousa.pt). You may also see the works of Steve Arnold,
> Marc Garneau, John Hanna, Sean Bird and others and see what
> kind of thing that crippled programming allows us to do when we
> think out of the box for a moment
"thinking out of the box for a moment" is an understatement for
"spending time working around artificial limitations"...
You could do better, with little additional (or even less) effort,
with a better language - as simple as that.
> and start to build instead of complaining.
You're being disrespectful.
Christopher would want to build some non-math and math programs
in C/ASM for the Nspire, because he would like to be able to use
the full power of the hardware and software (the way he has been
doing for years on the TI-Z80 calcs) - but he cannot due to lack
of documentation. IOW, he cannot due to TI's bloody fault.
Lionel.
> > First, you could at least pretend you took the time to read the post in
> > question, I think. Second, I agree that there are, but the problem is
> > that many students to not have access to such tools, books, lessons, etc.
> > Almost every student is forced to purchase a graphing calculator at
> > some point in their career, at least in the United States, and the
> > TI-83/84+ series gave students who wouldn't otherwise have exposure to
> > any programming classes or tools something with which to experiment.
> Are you serious??? It's easier to learn how to code on a calculator
> because there aren't enough resources available?
Er, where exactly do you parse such a statement ("easier to learn") in
Christopher's mail ?
I can't help but thinking - and this time, I'll state it - that it's not
the first time you fail at understanding other persons' points, and it's
not the first time you misrepresent their posts and opinions either.
In fact, if I had known that Christopher planned on posting his letter
here, I'd have dissuaded him, precisely because of your behaviour in
previous episodes...
Lionel.
On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 10:10, Lionel Debroux <debroux...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, TI has been the market leader for a long time, and behaves, in
> some ways, as a monopoly...
Matter of opinion, not fact. Either it's indeed a monopoly or close to
it, as it is in SOME countries, and this is a matter of fact, or it
isn't, as happens in a lot of countries and this too is a matter of
fact. Classifying their behaviour as monopoly-like is a matter of
opinion. You're entitled to yours, I'm entitled to mine.
> One easy example is mistreatment of users, which TI "can" afford because
> they're a monopoly. They don't even feel like fixing bugs that yield
> incorrect results, crash the calculator in normal operation and break
> programs.
Simply not true. Bugs exist in every platform as you may very well
know. Nspire's bugs have been fixed, I know of half a dozen of them.
Some I reported, others I learn about and found them patched in the
following release. Not all are fixed, not even close to that and one
may blame TI for not fixing bugs fast enough, but that's a totally
different matter. And, given Casio's update frequency, which is much
lower than TI's, I'd risk saying that Casio is even more disrespectul
of their users, by your claim.
> I fail to see where you read, in Christopher's message, a statement
> about the Prizm having specs superior _to the Nspire (CX)'s specs_ ?
The whole post was a direct critique to the Nspire and a presentation
of the Prizm as a better alternative.
> And it's a fact that the Prizm has specs superior to the TI-Z80 series,
> the TI-68k series, and most (if not all) Casio calc series
So are the Nspire's.
> The Nspire (CAS) (CX) is precisely _too_ centered on standardized
> testing... Capping the functionality in _normal operation mode_ to a
> sub-par BASIC is not good, in the opinion of many members of the open
> development community.
Yes, in their opinion. With which I respectfully disagree. I hope you
respectfully disagree with mine and we leave this as is. It's not the
first time we have this discussion
> 2) a testing mode, where this capability _can_ be disabled in case
> someone feels that it's really important to disable it.
In some countries press-to-test mode is not relevant to authorize or
not a calculator model. The authorized models are decided based on the
specifications, now whether there are or not special modes that limit
functionality in given circumstances. Examples: Portugal and US.
>> - how is Prizm such a better choice if in your own words its "BASIC
>> interpreter is painfully slow"?
> Perhaps slow is better than none ?
Please see below your comment about the existing/non-existing
programming power of the Nspire.
> IIRC, you already raised this point in a previous discussion, and I
> already showed why things are that way...
> Remember: games, as a special case of programs that don't _require_
> integration and intaction with the OS, are obviously _much_ easier to
> do without official documentation than math programs.
How are games _much_ easier to do??? Even more, in an obvious
manner??? Games are all but easy to code.
> Once you know how to write to the screen, read from the keyboard, and
> read/write some files (for the program loader), you're set for games.
> Not so for math programs, and obviously so ;)
Absolutely false. And obviously so.
> On both the TI-68k and TI-Z80 platforms, besides third-party reverse-
> engineering (which began before TI's help for TI-68k calcs and TI-Z80
> calcs),
It started around 1993/1994 with Magnus Hagander and the Z-Shell for
the TI-85. I was around back then. No disagreement here, just adding
more precise info.
TI released, more than ten years ago, some documentation about
> a number of system variables, data structures and system calls
> (BCALLs, ROM_CALLs) for manipulating math data / expressions.
> Let's be honest, TI's documentation, even if incomplete, helped both
> normal usage and further reverse-engineering.
> On TI-68k/AMS, TI even gradually expanded the feature set accessible
> to C/ASM programs - even if they forgot, or neglected, to export some
> of them that are arguably useful (e.g., but not limited to, push_xor,
> push_arclen, push_trig_expand, push_trig_collect, all AMS 2.08+
> auxiliary trig functions) as ROM_CALLs.
> See https://github.com/debrouxl/gcc4ti/commits/next-doc .
>
Yes, they released documentation. And, again, despite having all the
documentation available, people created almost exclusively games.
> On the Nspire platform, TI has released nothing, and it's extremely
> hard to find the necessary information by ourselves, since reverse-
> engineering an OS as huge as the Nspire OS is, is *much* harder than
> reverse-engineering the TI-Z80 OS and the TI-68k OS.
Reverse-engineering is illegal per the license agreement in most
countries. Namely, it's illegal in the US, France and Portugal, unless
you do a clean-room reverse engineering, which needs to be proven and
has never been.
> You can keep complaining about the making of C/ASM games instead of
> C/ASM math programs, but it's very easy to explain, and the blame lies
> with the manufacturer. And we'll keep rebutting you.
It's not easy to explain; it's not obvious where the blame lies. And
you haven't rebutted any fact I pointed out, just stated your
opinions, which are in total disagreement with mine. But, it's a
matter of opinion, not fact.
> You're completely missing the point - once again ;)
> As Christopher outlined in a later mail:
> "and the TI-83/84+ series gave students who wouldn't otherwise have
> exposure to any programming classes or tools something with which to
> experiment."
> We're obviously not talking about university students, because for
> those, as you certainly know, in a number of countries, calculator is
> an under-used tool at best, a forbidden tool in tests at worst.
> We're talking about high-schoolers.
Don't know where you see that obvious information. It's all but obvious.
1. It's not obvious for me that someone that founded Cemetech and has
been around for 10 years (his own words) is in high school. I hardly
think so;
2. It's not obvious that in most countries calculators are not used or
under-used at a college/university level, my experience tells me
otherwise, it takes all kinds;
3. Given that my email was a reply to his first email, I fail to see
where info he provided on a latter email can invalidate the argument I
made based on what he said previously.
> Christopher, I and thousands of others who now make programs for a
> living, got their first exposure to programming on calculators - or
> at least, used them as a transportable tool on which they started
> programming on a regular basis.
Guess what, I code for a living! And I feel absolutely no need to use
a calculator to code yet another port of Zelda. I understand how I
could feel the will to, but not the need. So, if you want to re-state
your argument and say "programmers WANT to use asm on the Nspire",
fine. But there's no NEED for it.
>> - how is it that with all that non existant programming power on
>> the Nspire rich content has been created with little or no
>> programming at all?
> Please quit being silly and behave as a grown-up...
> We're not saying that there's "non existant programming power on
> the Nspire", because that's *obviously* not true.
Please read above your comment about the Basic interpreter on the
Nspire, where you say "slow is better than none".
> "thinking out of the box for a moment" is an understatement for
> "spending time working around artificial limitations"...
And yet, that's what most people that code applications have to do for
a living, thing outside of the box, And no, it's not an
understatement. Perhaps if you took the time to learn how some of
those documents work you would find out that the tricks used are
actually quite simple. And most of them are even docummented, see the
tutorials on my website.
> You could do better, with little additional (or even less) effort,
> with a better language - as simple as that.
>> and start to build instead of complaining.
> You're being disrespectful.
So are you. In fact, so has the whole programming community that
simply refuses to accept other's points of view and fail to justify
their opinions with facts and state as fact or obvious things are just
are not.
Oh, if you want to know more about respect, perhaps you can look into
http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=139295, especially the
comments on pages 4, 5 and 6 that are directed towards what was said
in this forum.
Nelson
You have the right to disagree, as always.
> Oh, if you want to know more about respect, perhaps you can look
> into http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=139295, especially
> the comments on pages 4, 5 and 6 that are directed towards what was
> said in this forum.
Well, you already got some respect in the open development community
during the "we made it to xkcd" episode, due to statements such as (but
not limited to) "ti-bank's forum is actually useless".
Now, you get more of it, for another round of misunderstandings,
attempts at misrepresenting the statements of other persons, and
failure at grasping basic facts.
Lionel.
Surely there is a solution to preventing games in the classroom that
doesn't require limited and difficult programing, and surely TI can
figure out what that solution is, and surely we can support it.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love Omnicalc, Symbolic, and other prgms/apps that take advantage of the 83/84's loopholes. I'm just saying I understand where TI (and Apple) is coming from in this decision, and I don't fault them for it.I still think the Nspire is a much better tool than the 83/84, and I'm going to stick with it.--Eric F.
Oh, if you want to know more about respect, perhaps you can look into
http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=139295, especially the
comments on pages 4, 5 and 6 that are directed towards what was said
in this forum.
our nose to spite our face. The programing people want better
programability, and if TI impliments it, that will benefit us also.
Surely there is a solution to preventing games in the classroom that
doesn't require limited and difficult programing, and surely TI can
figure out what that solution is, and surely we can support it.
Joe, I'm not so sure that programming on the NSpire's is more
difficult than programming on the 83's and 84's. I've written
programs for all those machines, and once you understand how the
NSpire's program editor works, actually entering a program is easy,
compared to the 83/84. On the 83/84 you must enter programming
commands and instructions from the menus; the NSpire lets you just
type them in without fooling with a menu. The NSpire provides many
more structured programming constructs than the 83's. And the NSpire
libraries let you define your own functions and use them in other
programs easily, which is a great feature.
>> There are
>> many of us out there who use programming not to cheat, but rather to
>> hone in on one's own skills and to grasp a higher understanding of the
>> topics presented.
If this is the type of thing you want to program, then you should be quite happy with the programming capabilities of the Nspire. You don't need ASM or ARM to write functioms for Math, Physics, Chemistry, etc.
--Eric
Thank you Lana for taking the time to present a reasoned response to the formidable “threads” that are running here. I teach Alg I and Geo in an inner-city school and we were just gifted with TI Inspires and the Navigator System. I am running to catch up with all the new capability and so joined this group hoping to interact with others with more experience but with empathy for my position. I was just preparing to resign from the group (I don’t need a political upheaval directed toward TI or any other members of the technical community); but your post provided hope. I live in Dallas, TI’s home, and so am reassured that it’s not only Dallas folk who receive good service. Thank you for taking the time to give me hope.
Marilyn
The future is all about thinking and problem solving.it is not about mechanics and skills. A computer can do that but it cannot think!!
Next question: what about people teaching Math who have no training in teaching? There is your bone!! Go get it! Lol! I can play in the big league!!
Btw my students know what an integral is as well as how to compute them. I do not teach skills. I teach understanding . Skills follow - do not precede.
Sent from my iPhone
Lana
On the TI-Z80 and the TI-68k series, multiple on-calc programs overwrite
several select bytes of the OS, in order to kill limitations, e.g. AMS
2.xx special-casing the old 89/92+ HW1 calculators to reduce the amount
of user-available archive memory from 640 KB to 384 KB (!), or fix bugs
not fixed by TI.
Let's mention three on-computer patchers which perform more complex
patching than the on-calc programs do:
* PolyPatch ( original source
http://ti.bank.free.fr/index.php?mod=news&ac=commentaires&id=933 is
written in French, http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?topic=6324.0 is
written in English) unlocks and fixes the 84+ OS.
* tiosmod+amspatch (
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/146/146852.html ,
https://github.com/debrouxl/tiosmod ) unlocks, optimizes, fixes,
restores an improved version of something removed by TI in 2000, and
additionally shrinks 2.08 and 2.09 for 89, moving some data to a huge
space left unused by TI, so as to make them fit in the same space budget
as AMS 2.05 does. But the vast majority of the unfixed bugs listed in
http://www.ibiblio.org/technicalc/buglist/bugs.pdf are too hard for us
third parties to fix...
* Chameleon enables upgrading the 73 to 83+ functionality level.
Patching on the computer side enables re-signing the patched OS, which
has been demonstrated on a real TI-Z80 but takes minutes, and also
enables making and distributing binary diffs between the pristine and
patched OS.
All of this was made possible by man-years of reverse-engineering work
over more than a decade, and in 2009, several CPU-years for factoring
the RSA public keys.
Lionel.
Sent from my iPhone
Lana
Sent from my iPhone
Lana
To unsubscribe send email to tinspire+u...@googlegroups.com
About legality or not of reverse engineering: Read the EULA which you
must agree upon in order to use the TI-Nspire software. It explicit
prohibits reverse engineering the software and, therefore, doing it is
a breach of contract. It's illegal because you agreed with a contract
that says so.
You need to give me real solid reasonings for continuing to teach a useless skill. Convince me that it will deepen our students' understanding of math. How many years have you been teaching? Where do you teach? Kids are so turned off by 1950's math - and that is sad. Just look at the research!
And Joe I do a lot of things in a day. I cannot possibly remember every little detail. I look at the big pic. But no one studying physics would publish a math paper. Just cuz I was good at math doesn't mean I would publish anything.
And btw I am published- just not math. I have had many of my grief poems about the death of my only child published. And when I have the time I wll have a complete collection of my writings published in a book. In addition I am just starting to work on a play about the loss of my only child - in memory of her. The world truly lost a great mathematician when she was killed.
Sent from my iPhone
Lana
I'm no lawyer and have absolutely no intention in engaging in a legal
debate, especially over copyright law on countries other than my own
and perhaps not even in that case. But I'm pretty sure that if big
corporations had non enforceable provisions in contracts a lot of
lawyers would have been fired.
Nelson
Nelson
--
--Eric
1) what is the purpose of the Nspire (what kind of tool is it)?
And
2) is the programming capability on the Nspire sufficient or "crippled"?
I, for one, think that the programming capabilities as much more powerful and much easier to use than the 83/84, but I know there are others who feel differently.
Because we cannot agree on these two cornerstones of each side of the argument, it will just continue as a back and forth without any progress.
--Eric
However, anything beyond that minimum BASIC functionality level, should
TI be willing to give such access, _is_ definitely useful. And we'd also
take it any day - we're taking all the manufacturer has to offer us, and
creating more of our own, for the right to tinker and use the
hardware/software at its potential ;-)
The TI-68k series offers hundreds of powerful functions dealing with the
EStack, i.e. lower-level math functionality that can be leveraged to
implement faster programs with better algorithms. So should the Nspire !
In the current state of things:
* Mrakoplaz has ported the rather complicated DOOM to the Nspire with
quite some effort, and I have easily and quickly ported six simple C/ASM
graphical demos (none of them can be considered a real game), because
games don't require any significant OS integration: screen, keyboard,
files, and from the POV of the programmer of a Ndless-based program,
you're ready for the party;
* no third-party can port any of the several C/ASM math programs to the
Nspire, due to - as I already mentioned - lack of documentation on the
data structures, the functions dealing with them, and the extreme
difficulty of sifting through that large OS in order to make third-party
documentation of math functionality.
* from the POV of a BASIC programmer, the Nspire is more open to math
than to games; from the POV of a C/ASM programmer, the Nspire platform
is _much_ more open to games than to math (and only TI can fix that) !
> That would be of benefit to teachers also if some sort of "push for
> class" button could be used to prevent third party apps from being run
> (in class) which the students (not taking any time or effort from the
> teachers) can reset it electronically on the way out the door.
Not sure how that could be implemented in a foolproof manner ?
> That sounds to me to be progress in the right direction for everyone.
> I think we initially miss understood what you guys wanted. I know that
> I did, and you are actually wanting the same things that I for one,
> want. Namely ti-83/84 programing capability. Thank you for clearing
> this up. I support your effort to obtain programing on par with the
> TI-83/84 programing. Perhaps by crippleing the programing TI had good
> intentions but it has back fired and had very undesirable and
> unanticipated consequences for everyone.
We'd take 83+/84+ and TI-68k BASIC functionality level any day, yes.
Lionel.