Is the Prime truly ready for prime time?

[Don Shepherd]

(03-17-2014 07:55 AM)debrouxl Wrote:  I guess I stand corrected about BASIC on Nspire OS 1.1 - but then, which basic feature was missing from that version and only added several months later ?

Lionel, I'm not sure. Originally, the simple IF statement did not work as described in the manual, but that turned out to be a documentation problem and they updated the documentation. The program editor did not exist originally, if I recall correctly, and it was a real pain to enter a program (you couldn't press the ENTER or RETURN key until the last line of the program). I think it took them at least a year to get the program editor.

But the biggest initial deficiency, of course, was the lack of any interactive INPUT statement (interestingly, the original Dartmouth BASIC, THE very first BASIC, also lacked an INPUT statement in its initial release of May, 1964 [coming up on its 50th anniversary, BTW]; INPUT didn't arrive in Dartmouth BASIC until version 3, in 1966). Dartmouth BASIC lacked INPUT initially due mainly to hardware limitations. It was no secret that Nspire BASIC lacked INPUT because TI didn't want students playing games on it.