Greetings

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New guy

Greetings

saint thomas 15 Jul 2021 15:29

Greetings everyone.
I am a recently retired chemist who finally has time to do things that interest me. While I've spent 45 years working in various laboratories doing chemistry stuff my experience with programmable calculators and computers is rather wide and varied.

My first experience with programmable calculators was with a TI-58C and TI-59 back in 1980. My first experience with programming a computer goes back before that when my High School offered a course in programming FORTRAN. I wrote these programs using punch cards (anyone know what those are?) and they ran on a main frame. My next experience with programming came when I got to write programs for an Apple ][+ and Apple //e. I originally started programming in BASIC but then learned to program the Apple in assembly (6502 and 65C02). Around 1988 my laboratory bought an Apple ][GS so I used what I learned programming the Apple //e to integrate the Apple ][GS with the laboratory balances by writing a program in assembly. This was the beginning of computers being integrated in a chemistry laboratory. So when I began my career every analysis was done by hand and there were no computers and when I retired almost everything is done using a computer. There are very few instruments that are not hooked up to a computer now.

I liked the Apple ][GS enough that I bought one in 1988. Right at this time the company whose assembler I was using offered a C compiler. So I started my journey learning to program in C. Over the following decades I have written programs in C for Macs, PCs and even a little bit for Linux. Sometime in early 2000, again for work I started using a TI-83+ and learned to write utility programs in TI-Basic. Sometimes it was just a lot easier and faster to do that then write a program on the computer.

Computers have gotten so complex now that I don't particularly enjoy writing programs for them. Looking for simpler times in my retirement I decided that I would return to my roots so I bought a TI-84+CE and am attempting to learn the ins and outs of programming it in C and in ez80 assembly. And that, folks, is why I am here! I am hopeful that I can use this sites resources to learn this stuff.
The Saint

Re: Greetings

J_Walker87 15 Jul 2021 18:35

Welcome! I'm 15 and am just entering the 12th grade. I found this ez80 assembly resource you may like: https://ez80.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/intro.html. I have one of the monochrome calculators (a TI-83+), and programming in assembly on that is really fun. I recommend learning plain hexadecimal instead of mnemonic assembly, and maybe making your own program to handle labels and equates since that's super annoying in hex. Of course, this is a matter of preference, and if you like mnemonic assembly just use that. Also, make sure you don't get an update on your calculator. TI banned assembly on their latest OS version. This can be gotten around, so it's not too big of a deal, but it can be easier to just keep an older OS version that has built-in support to run assembly programs you make. You may also want to use an on-calculator assembler (if you are using mnemonic assembly) if you don't want to plug your calculator into your computer every time you use it. Have a nice day!

Re: Greetings

saint thomas 16 Jul 2021 16:35

Thanks,

You're 15 and entering 12 grade? You're way smarter then me and I'm a Chemist!

I am aware of TI's decision to no longer support assembly so I know not to upgrade the 84+CE OS. Mine has OS 5.3.1.0058.

I understand the reason why TI did it, they are, after all, in business to sell calculators and most are bought for students. Since some students decided to use assembly to cheat by making it appear that their calculators are in test mode when they are not TIs calculators could be banded from exams. If this happened then students would buy some other approved calculator and TI would go out of business so TI was basically forced to do this.

As far as assembly goes the principles of ez80 assembly isn't that much different from 65816 assembly that I programmed the ][GS with. Both use 8-bit accumulators. The 6502/65C02 has all 8-bit registers like the Z80 and the 65816 has 16-bit registers as opposed to the 24-bit registers of the ez80. The mnemonic are written differently. For example Load Accumulator is LDA in 6502/65C02/65816 and ld a in Z80/ez80. So it should be relatively easy for me to adjust. Just as with the old Apples I used to program an important part of being able to write assembly programs for the 84+CE is that I need to understand the architecture of the calculator and the ROM calls.

Thanks for the suggestions about using hex coding. I have written code purely using hex but I find it very difficult to do for anything but a really small program. For the ][GS I wrote a rather large program in assembly (about 50,000 lines of code) that did a bunch of statistics stuff for the lab, so I'm used to using the mnemonics.

Re: Greetings

J_Walker87 17 Jul 2021 23:53

Ok, have fun!

Re: Greetings

J_Walker87 22 Jul 2021 23:17

Hey, I'm in the process of building a compiler on my calculator. FORTRAN 77 came to my attention because it's pretty simple. Since you mentioned that you took a course on it (albeit a long time ago), I figured I'd ask for you thoughts. Do you think that FORTRAN 77 would be a useful language to implement?

Re: Greetings

saint thomas 23 Jul 2021 20:38

Greetings,
I'm probably not the best person to ask this question as I only occasionally use FORTRAN now. I'm not really sure how widely used FORTRAN is these days. I do the vast majority of my programming using C.

I used FORTRAN a few years ago because I wanted to use JPL's Development Ephemerides on my computer. These are the same ones they use to navigate their spacecraft through the solar system. Anyway, to create an Ephemeride that I could use on my computer I had to compile the FORTRAN source code JPL provided so I had to give myself a refresher course.

Not to in any way discourage you but there already is a C compiler available for the ez80 called ez80-clang and a Toolchain for writing C programs specifically for the TI-84+CE called the CE C Toolchain. It has a very good math library.

I am a bit curious though you said that you are "building a compiler ON my calculator". The CE C Toolchain is on my computer and I write programs on my computer which I compile and then upload to the calculator. Is yours actually on the calculator?

Re: Greetings

J_Walker87 31 Jul 2021 21:13

Sorry it took me so long to reply. Yes, I'm actually building the compiler on my calculator. Also, my calculator is a monochrome calculator, so it has a regular Z80, not an eZ80 like yours.

My compiler is written in Ti-BASIC, which is the interpreted language on your calculator. It compiles code into a hex string, which I can then paste into an assembly program. All of this is done on the calculator, there is no other computer involved. I ended up deciding to stay away from FORTRAN because to build a compiler for it I'd have to spend a lot of time encoding features that aren't very useful for my purpose (which is game development).

I've already made (and no longer have the source code for) a simple compiler that compiles a really crappy language that I haven't (and won't) do the honor of giving a name because it's so bad.

Right now I'm casually building a brainf**k compiler while I think about what programming language I should implement. The options I'm currently considering are a tiny BASIC dialect, Forth, and a programming language I'm coming up with myself but is very much incomplete as of now.

If you have any thoughts, let me know!

Re: Greetings

saint thomas 10 Aug 2021 20:43

sounds interesting (and difficult) Good Luck