can anyone tell me why the fast circle argument works? Why didn't TI automatically put it in, or document it?
I don't think anyone really knows why it works, but just be glad it does :D
To make things more confusing, it is the default setting for drawing circles on the TI-73. I assume they kept a lot of the code for the OS the same, from calculator to calculator (especially since the hardware is nearly identical). Why they'd add the slow circle drawing method is beyond me, but it makes sense, in a twisted sort of way, that they kept both versions of the circle drawing code.
do you think I should email TI and ask them?
I think you will get no response, or at least, no decent one. But heck, you've got to be in it to win it. Why not try?
Cheers ~ James Kanjo
Hey! I just figured out something! Instead of manually typing out //some text//, and instead of pressing the "Italics" button, the standard "Ctrl+I" keyboard shortcut works too! Yay me! I can do things faster now!
I almost forgot: I emailed TI about the differences of the opposite sides of the link cable, and they didn't respond
Typical. That company (is it a company?) doesn't care about informing the public how their products work. If they did a proper job of that the first time, there would be no need for this wiki.
But…we like their products. It is ironic that they released their products to the public, and the public are writing documentation on it. If we didn't like their products, we wouldn't be wasting our time documenting them.
In any case, good luck and I hope they respond with the answers to our puzzles.
Cheers ~ James Kanjo
@James Kanjo- You are absolutely right. It's been over a week now, and they still haven't responded.
You know, in all my time reading the ti-83 plus manual, which has never been changed for the entire 10 or so years of it's existence, the only thing I ever learned from it was how to use insert. Before that, me and my bud Brad thought we had to rewrite the rest of the code whenever we messed something up. (we were pretty stupid that first few weeks with programming)
thank you. I will probably email them Sunday or Monday.
Ditto! I did exactly the same thing, and that WAS the only thing I learnt from the manual! At least they got something right!
You're pretty lucky; what I learned from the manual was how to access list elements. Before that, to get the Nth element of a list, I created a new list which was all 0 except for a 1 in that Nth element, multiplied the two together, and took the sum.
I actually learned a significant amount from the manual. Before I got my 84+SE, I used the manual to see the different arguments that can be used with functions. The matrix and list chapters are fairly in-depth, and it even shows storing a custom list without the subscript L (which is considered an 'advanced trick')
The example in the function graphing chapter uses boolean expressions for piecewise expressions. The programming chapter mentions the word 'game' and implies that TI-Basic can be used for games, which is more than any other TI manual (or website).
There's also one other thing that makes the manual essential to any programmer: a multitude of examples of what not to do in programs, remember the sierpinski triangle?
(One more thing: it's proper name is 'TI-Bible')
I believe that the faster circle() command is faster, but less accurate. and thats why it is not default.
How is it less accurate? The picture of the circles are the same when drawn both ways.
Actually, due to round-off error, the circles may be different in some cases. But then, the difference is always that the slower Circle( fails to be symmetric. Given that symmetry is pretty much the defining property of a circle, I'd argue that the faster Circle( command is more accurate.
Example of difference: in the standard window, Circle(-5,0,2.1) produces a different circle from Circle(-5,0,2.1,{i}).