2 ms·
> If you wanted to represent any large/complicated data types, you often had to resort to encoding it in strings and doing lots of substring math to slice out t
by donatj 4y ago
> If you wanted to represent any large/complicated data types, you often had to resort to encoding it in strings and doing lots of substring math to slice out the fields. Absolutely insane anti-patterns in any "real" programming language.
I think all TI graphing calculators support matrices, certainly the entire 8x line including the 83. It’s a much better way to handle large data sets than string finagling when programming them. You can treat them as a 2 dimensional array. The TI-73 has some dumb price/grade-ranged restrictions on operations and dimensions.
I collect calculators and own almost every model of TI graphing calculator except some of the newer color models.
http://blogs.jccc.edu/math/files/2011/12/Matrices-and-the-TI-83-84.pdf http://blogs.jccc.edu/math/files/2011/12/Matrices-and-the-TI...
- gamegoblin 4y agoMatrices were fine if your data mapped to 2 numeric dimensions snugly, but otherwise waste a ton of space. Space was the main constraint here. With strings, you could get very close to base256 encoding, because you could store any valid token as a single byte, and there were almost 256 tokens. E.g. SIN, COS, TAN are all single tokens. Whereas matrices take up 9 bytes per element. A lot of games used bitmaps to store sprites or level data, so as long as you avoided a few forbidden patterns, you could encode 8 pixels per token which was pretty cool.