After recently finding one of my old calculators (I had two 83+'s for the longest time, but lost one) I have stumbled upon what was the best program I had made, 4 years into programming. Mind you up to just after this point I had almost zero experience online (tutorials, guides, or even contact with almost any other programmer), and a few weeks/months after making this project, I found my home forums: DevHardware.

Here is my once prized program, TICTACTO: (WARNING: This code was made before I knew the term "optimization" or how to "optimize" code. The file is absolutely massive, and iirc, is about 8-12 KB. Also, it was severely corrupted, so some of it may not work properly, and you may run into syntax errors. I tried taking out anything that was corrupted, but let me know if you find anything that looks like it wouldn't work. Lastly, this whole code was de-token-ized by Merth's TokensIDE, so ignore the "" breaks)

Code:

Oh, the humanity!


Code:

In retrospect, I'm clueless why I thought that strings would be the best plan of action for each cell of the grid. I was just talking to someone (I think it may have been joshie75, but I can't remember) the other day about their TicTacToe program, and that matrices were going to be your best choice, and that I had use strings in mine for reasons beyond me (or at least now).

That looks like a GIANT script for a calculator game =O

Not to mention why you would use that method instead of a single nine-character string if you were so set on strings. I can only assume sub() was a foreign concept to you.

Wow, that's, um, huge. Here's my smallest attempt:

Code:

Note: This was written 7 years ago, and according to the description I wrote, it's the smallest BASIC TTT out there (this was true at the time).

The same was probably true of memory leakage as well.

@Merth
I wanted it to be extensive, and I had little knowledge of how to make things like this smaller, faster, or more efficient. I think that at the time, this little program would have blown my mind.

@ScoutDavid
Indeed it is, and unfortunately, this was not the largest that I had ever made.

Looks to me like it's AI-less, though, no? The versions of TTT that I've written for the calculator have all been player versus calculator with associated AI. Some optimizations:


Code:
to
Code:
Remove 17 bytes, add seven bytes; saves ten bytes.

A-(10B+1->A to A-10B-1->A (Save 1 byte)

0->B \ For(A,1,3 to DelVar BFor(A,1,3 (Save 2 bytes)

Save 4 bytes:

Code:
to
Code:

Actually, it has 4 difficulties of AI, including impossible mode. And the last optimizations you did there, I'm pretty sure that I did that to prevent an invalid dimensions error, but that's only a guess. I also remember getting some weird glitches/errors while using DelVar so I always was hesitant to use it. I was probably trying to use a "Delvar BEnd" optimization though, but idk. I also remember at the time describing Ans (word-for-word) as, "...taking a leap-of-faith. You can't be sure about it." I remembered this very well because it's such an absolute contradiction from how I program now.

I believe Kerm was referring to Merthsoft's program, but I only checked one or two of the lines he was optimizing (and only in Merth's program)

_player is correct; I was critiquing Merth's code. Also, I see what you mean about the [A](...) conditional; that was indeed necessary as you said.

oh man, you have no idea

my first calc was used and came without that handbook, and i had no experience with any other programming language before starting Ti-Basic. i basically just played around, trying to figure out the syntax, until i was able to approximate the desired function. the first time i looked at a list of basic commands explaining what they did was when searching for an xlib (which i got sans-documentation from a download of one of the metroids) command lists on the ticalc 'programming' page... five months after i started programming

i used to do things like this:

:0->L₁(A)
:A+1->A
:0->L₁(A)
:A+1->A
:0->L₁(A)
:A+1->A
:0->L₁(A)
:A+1->A
:0->L₁(A)
:A+1->A
:0->L₁(A)

because i never figured out the purpose of For(

lol thats like me. in my first weeks or so of programing, i had no clue what a loop was, so i would make two programs, the main program, and one that ran that program over and over. also, whenever i wanted to slow something down, for example, display something for a lenghth of time, i would type the same command over and over again, and then still only get half a second of pause time

Awww, poor shmibs and Rhombus. I'm glad you're in our friendly fold now so we can properly direct and chide you and others when they do things like that.

I've also got a Lbl X but no Goto X . Like I said, it was 7 years ago, certainly not perfect. At the time, though, I was quite happy with it

I'll certainly agree that for code you wrote in your early teens, it's definitely quite commendable.

Ahh, I remember my first progs were clocks on the 86 I had x->x about 50 times, and I could never get rid of the quarter-second delay you got when it updated the minutes

Almost directly after that I found out what for( was for, and after that I found while(I had been using ifs and gotos XD)

Haha, very nice. I suppose it's a tribute to an individual's aptitude for programming when he or she writes alternatives to correct commands that he or she doesn't know, though.

I guess. I'm still not that good. Let's just say that if I took a course in Axe, it would be 101

Oh man, I remember one of my first programs was a short "movie" showing a pixel falling (linearly of course, no real physics) and then exploding like a nuke.

I didn't know For loops exists so I painstakingly wrote:


Code:


For EVERY PIXEL from the top of the screen to the bottom... It took up so much time writing that...