Author Topic: Silly things you did as a noob  (Read 19662 times)

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Offline ztrumpet

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #15 on: July 06, 2010, 04:03:03 pm »
The best example I have is that I always used to close my parentheses, brackets, etc.
I actually used to do that too, and I made sure all my Disp statements used strings that were 16 characters (yes, padded with spaces). :P

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #16 on: July 06, 2010, 04:04:43 pm »
oh, one thing I used to do (and caught my self doing a couple months ago) was making a text en/decoder, you would input a string, it would cycle through that string, and on every line was a "If Str2='A':'Z'->Str3", I knew about instring() and sub(), but never thought to together x.x  I think that's how I got so good at getting to the strings through menus :P

Offline TC01

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #17 on: July 06, 2010, 06:54:00 pm »
Like some others, I used to close all parenthesis, and insert extra parenthesis even when the calculation didn't need them.

Also, the first time I saw a Garbage Collect message on archiving, I wasn't sure what it would do (having not actually read my manual) and so, afraid that it would delete programs from my calculator (as "garbage"), I put off doing it. That meant I never archived anything- and soon after that, my calc got locked up and I needed to pull a battery to reset it, so I lost everything.

This was before I started backing up to my computer too. Fortunately, all I lost were math programs that were on some of my friends' calcs, so it was easy to get them back. Then I read the manual, figured out what garbage collecting did, and started doing computer backups.

(This was all on the 83+).



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And in addition to calculator (and Python!) stuff, I mod Civilization 4 (frequently with Python).

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #18 on: July 06, 2010, 07:06:47 pm »
In many cases, I often accidentally used two : chars between lines of code

I also put my entire programs in one single line of code. In some ways it is good, though, because it saves a lot of time with 2:Goto and when manually scrolling through the code. Otherwise it is risky, because if you press CLEAR you lose everything and the code is hard to read.

Another thing I did a few times: I decided to switch to lowercase letters in some of my BASIC RPGs. BAD idea. I did not realize about lowercase letters being two byte tokens. I eventually ran out of RAM x.x

Offline TC01

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #19 on: July 06, 2010, 07:25:52 pm »
Another thing I did a few times: I decided to switch to lowercase letters in some of my BASIC RPGs. BAD idea. I did not realize about lowercase letters being two byte tokens. I eventually ran out of RAM x.x
That reminds me of something I did when I started programming my 89 Titanium- I used spaces to indent lines of Basic code, like in this sample program, and then I'd add additional spaces to anything under a loop or if statement.

Code: [Select]
hello()
Prgm
 ClrIO()
 Disp "Hello world"
Prgm

Since on the 89 the interpreter ignores all whitespace before code, it didn't cause any problems. Except, each character- including a space- adds a byte to the program size... so the Basic programs I wrote ended up much larger than necessary.

Not that that's so much a problem on the Titanium, since it has so much memory, and it does make the code more readable- but when you realize that for every line under a loop, I would be adding two bytes, and then under an if statement, three bytes, and so on... it could easily get way out of hand.



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And in addition to calculator (and Python!) stuff, I mod Civilization 4 (frequently with Python).

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #20 on: July 06, 2010, 08:15:22 pm »
I am glad Axe Parser at least remove those from compiled code (altough sadly, if you lose your source, all you can retrieve afterward is the ASM disassembly of your Axe program, free of all comments)

Offline bwang

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #21 on: July 06, 2010, 09:04:07 pm »
Back when I first started programming, it took me a couple days to find out where the For, While, If, and Then statements lived. I was very confused because typing F, O, R gave me a syntax error :(

_player1537

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #22 on: July 06, 2010, 09:09:53 pm »
lol, I did that too, for the guessing game I think it was, the one that was in the manual, I used MOS to give me lowercase letters, and wrote out each command letter by letter.  I learned later the meaning of that random catalog button on the 0 key.

I also used to get really screwed by the way that MOS turned on fast keys, and the lowercase letters one (though not as much)  I had no idea that those were even in MOS, I just assumed my calculator was spazzing out, when I tried to insert a line, I'd delete 5 letters, when I tried to move one letter to the right, I'd be halfway down the page.  The only way I knew to fix it was ram clear, then not run MOS (I figured out that MOS was doing it after a while, so it became less my favorite shell).  Then I went to DetachedSolutions, and saw that MOS had those options x.x

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #23 on: July 06, 2010, 09:10:33 pm »
haha on the TI-80, I remember many people did that XD

All tokens were all-caps so people thought they could type alpha tokens instead

Offline Deep Toaster

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #24 on: July 06, 2010, 10:10:51 pm »
The first platformer I ever made was exactly 9001 bytes ... and I wasn't even trying. In fact, I'd never even heard of the meme.




Offline Builderboy

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #25 on: July 07, 2010, 02:24:24 am »
In the original version of Portal the external level editor always saved to the same custom List, and was always loaded from the same custom List.  So you could only have one custom level on your calculator at the same time unless you were tricky :P

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #26 on: July 07, 2010, 02:57:49 am »
D:

Kinda like xLIB xLIB Revolution D:

You needed to ungroup a level everytime x.x (and they were HUGE!)

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #27 on: July 07, 2010, 03:07:29 am »
Mine was even worse: that OVER 9000! byte program I mentioned above allowed custom levels, but the "level editor" was basically an empty Input "",Str1, where you would have to type out the entire code for the level by hand (assuming every user instinctively knew how I coded my levels and could code an impromptu level exactly :P).




Offline ztrumpet

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #28 on: July 07, 2010, 10:59:14 am »
In the original version of Portal the external level editor always saved to the same custom List, and was always loaded from the same custom List.  So you could only have one custom level on your calculator at the same time unless you were tricky :P
Yup, but I've still used it to make levels of my own. :P

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Re: Silly things you did as a noob
« Reply #29 on: July 17, 2010, 02:21:52 pm »
Full
ClrHome
Output(1,1,"WELCOME TO PRGM NAME. HERE ARE   THE INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO USE IT.
Pause
ClrHome
Output(1,1,"FIRST, THE      CONTROLS:
Pause
ClrHome
Output(1,1,"ARROWS: MOVE    ENTER: CONFIRM  (-): MENU/CANCELON: EXIT
Pause
ClrHome

What's in red was unnecessary, this is something I did often in my early days of programming x.x. It can make things uniform by flashing the screen, but it's so fast that it's hard to notice and on 15 MHz platforms it's hardly even noticeable, even less at higher contrast.

Another thing I did was Stuff like:

ClrHome
Output(1,1,"CONTROLS        2ND:JUMP        ^v<>:MOVE       CLEAR:EXIT

Instead of
ClrHome
Disp "CONTROLS","2ND:JUMP","^v<>:MOVE","CLEAR:EXIT

The later is slower but much smaller.