In one of our exploratory forays away from the Cemetech booth at T³, we had the opportunity to play with the calculators being used to demonstrate the new TI Innovator System. As strings are anticipated to be the primary method of communication with the Innovator modules, including for transfer of potentially varying numerical data, several new commands are in the works, which should ease that perpetual thorn in the side of TI-BASIC programmers.


Sneak Peek @ Upcoming TI-BASIC Features by Thomas Dickerson, on Flickr

Unfortunately, it must be emphasized that while knowledge of their existence is very exciting, these commands are still under development, and our contacts at TI have communicated it's possible that developer attention will be needed elsewhere between now and their release in a public OS version.

Wow. If this is part of OS 5.2, TI-BASIC will get some features it has long been lacking.

I don't understand from that screenshot the exact function of the two commands—can eval( execute strings like on the homescreen? does toString work with lists or strings? In any case, toString( should allow so much that BASIC programmers have been missing. Definitely looking forward to this, if it is released.

Supposedly, 5.2 also comes with a Wait command (Wait <seconds> or Wait(<seconds>)?) where it takes a value from 0.0 to 100.9 as argument. It seems similar to the HP Prime, but the seconds are not very accurate it seems (in the screenshot below, 4.5 seconds actually takes 8, unless it's CEmu running slower or capture being slower).

OS 5.1.5 already has a similar feature, with the Pause command, where if you add a second argument to Pause, it creates a delay similar to the upcoming Wait command. You can even scroll through long text during the delay. The busy indicator will also appear like if the calculator was paused, but you won't be able to press 2nd nor ALPHA:



Here was the topic about it https://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=1161 (taken from https://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18020 ). The new command seems to have gone unnoticed until recently, but if you go to Catalog Help it explains the new syntax.

Awesome! I assume this isn't for the CSE, unfortunately. It would make my life (and my programs) easier.

Any update on whether this will make it into 5.2?

I haven't heard anything myself. The TI Innovator system isn't due to be released until the fall, so I'd imagine we'll see OS 5.2 during the summer at the earliest. I'll ask elfprince if his conversations have yielded any updates, though.