Hi I'm Z80man. I'm currently a sophmore in high school. Last year I got my first graphing calculator, a Ti-84+ SE. Within a few weeks I was making my first basic programs. As I got better I made more advanced programs. Eventually I became frustruated with the slow speed and lack of capability of basic. Thats when I was introduced to asm programming. I'm also fluent in the C/C++ langaunge too. This year for Christmas I got the Casio Prizm. As of now I'm trying to decode the header for apps. Other news about me is that I'm am an avid runner competing on both my school's cross country and track teams.

Welcome to omnimaga. Have some peanuts:

Eventually I became frustruated with the slow speed and lack of capability of basic.

I have to ask: what capabilities does BASIC lack, aside from disabling the obvious run indicator and crashing the calc?

Most languages are Turing complete, which means they can technically be used for any project. TI-BASIC is one of those languages.

By use, I'm assuming you have a few thousand years to do the computations, given how slow BASIC is 

Not in the sense of Turing completeness, where you have to disregard speed of execution. Of course, one would never use BASIC to write an OS because it would be almost as slow as TI-OS v2.53

With TI-BASIC, you can't store stuff directly to memory addresses you want and a map engine will run at about 4 frames per second on a regular 83+ with collision detection, even on the home screen, even if optimized. A raycaster would take one minute per frame to render (calc84maniac tried). This is how slow TI-BASIC is. However, in TI-BASIC, you can still do quite nice games. See Ztrumpet and Builderboy stuff, for example. I made plenty of RPGs in BASIC too that people liked, but some used ASM libraries.

ANyway welcome z80man!

Actually you could turn off the indicator (kinda) by doing Text(0,94," ", I think, but I'm not sure anymore. It effectively had many limitations, though. You can make great games with it, but making a pure BASIC Metroid game with ASM-like graphics that doesn't take a minute to load is nearly impossible.

One big advantage of BASIC over Axe and ASM, though, is that a lot of code is smaller than its ASM counterpart. For example, in Axe, 9-VAR takes 7 bytes for the -VAR part, while in BASIC it takes 2. This is because the BASIC code is interpreted. However, data in BASIC is huge compared to Axe. To get the smallest possible game, you almost have to write parts of them in ASM/Axe and the rest in BASIC.

Btw, I don't quite understand how basic lacks integers?  Isn't that essential for a calc?

All math in basic is done with floating point variables which are much slower and take up more space