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Code your TI84Plus BASIC programs on a computer (using your favorite editor!)
Sat Mar 22 2025 ~ Tags: ti84plus programming basic mathHave you ever programmed your TI84 Plus calculator? You have probably seen that you can code BASIC directly on it, but did you know that you could make those programs on your computer and transfer them instead? That is way more convenient. More importantly, it is way more fun that way! It enables you to give the computer more
Read more..Pi Day 2025 - Let's have fun with numbers!
Fri Mar 14 2025 ~ Tags: math python pi pidayToday is Pi day! March 14th has become known as Pi day, probably because of the American way of displaying dates (3/14). It is also the birthday of Albert Einstein. Use this day to have fun with numbers and mathematics, or maybe read about famous mathematicians. This article will give you a bit of both!
Read more..Bit tricks - Absolute value without branching
Mon Feb 14 2022 ~ Tags: programming low-level retro-computing mathBit trickery is always interesting! Sometimes you can use them to avoid branching (like if-checks), other times they are useful to save a few CPU cycles to avoid expensive operations. The absolute value trick I will show you here, is mostly to avoid branching. Why would you want to avoid branching? Many newer processors, from the mid 90s and onward, do something called pipelining to achieve a form of instruction level parallelism. While a classic processor fetch an instruction, decode it, then execute, a pipelined processor can fetch the next instruction while the previous one is decoded. You can have multiple operations like this almost in parallel. If we have to branch, like for an if-check, we might not have fetched the correct next instruction anymore, and might have to fetch new ones (for the whole pipeline). This can be an expensive operation. Calculating absolute values is a problem where we often have to have a branch (an if-check for smaller than 0).
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