Looks through a list to find the first non-zero element.
list - The list or list variable to look through.
The index of the first non-zero element in the list.
If all the elements are zero, the result is one greater than the size of the list.
None erased.
TI-89/92/+/V200
:firstnz(list)
:1+sum(floor(1/(1+cumSum(abs(list))))
This function finds the first non-zero element in a list, and returns its index.
The innermost part of the formula makes the list easier to deal with: abs() makes all non-zero elements positive, then cumSum() ensures that after the first non-zero element, every next element in the result is also non-zero. After this, the list begins with some number of zeroes (possibly none at all), then only positive numbers. Now, to find the index of the first non-zero element, we must find the number of zero elements, and add 1.
The function floor(1/(1+x)) sends 0 to 1/(1+0)=1, and every positive number to 0. After we apply it to the result above, all the zeroes are replaced by 1, and all the other numbers by 0. Then, sum() adds all the 1s, counting the number of elements that used to be 0. Adding 1 to the result gets the index of the element one past all the zeroes, which is the result we want.
This explanation still doesn't answer the real question: why such a bizarre approach when a more simple one is possible — going through the list in a For..EndFor loop, and checking if each element is 0 until you get to one that's not? The answer is that accessing list elements one by one is very slow: to get to a middle element of a list, the calculator must go through all the elements before it. This means that when you access a list's elements in a For loop, you're going through the entire beginning of the list each time the loop cycles.
To avoid this, we use commands that deal with all the elements of a list at once. Because their code is written in the calculator's own assembly language, it doesn't have to go through this rigmarole to access a list. As a result, the strange-looking routine is faster, and its advantage becomes greater and greater with long lists.
Error Conditions
210 - Data type happens when the input is not a list.
