What's the best calc for programming (especially on-calc)? I already have a TI-84+SE, Nspire Touchpad Non-CAS, and Nspire CX CAS. I'm open to any brand of calc.

Yeah, defenetley the TI-83+/84+ series, as the support nativley assembly code a lot of stuff has been made for them, like axe parser, awesome basic libs (xlib, anyone? or batlib ) other languages (grammer) and there are also on-calc assemblers for that calculator

TI-89/92+ of course!! 

Ranman runs before he gets his --- beat!

And if you want to appease the wrath of Ranman and help revive the 68K scene, go for the TI-89s!

Well... You got some good points Deep.

I personally love the 68K calcs. 188Kb RAM available to user -- no page swapping, native support of 32 bit integers, 68K BASIC is very powerful (still slow), 68K assembly is easy, and powerful C support. And you get decenct LCD specs (160x100 TI89, 240x128 92+/V200)

For Z80 calcs: their BASIC is powerful but slow as well, Z80 assembly is not as straightforward, limited RAM requiring page swaps. These limitations can be fun to work with though. And now you have... Axe which is pretty darn cool!

For nSpires: not too sure about these bad boys. Great LCD resolution. LUA programming language -- since I am a C/C++ guy, I dont care for Lua.

You could go for a Casio 9860 or Casio Prizm. 9860s have good LCDs specs, 64Kb RAM, BASIC and C languages available. Prizms sound like a middle ground between 84/89 series and the nSpire.

My next calc may indeed be a Prizm.

Ranman runs again

It depends of your standards IMHO. I love my TI-84+ but if the line at which you start considering game graphics decent is Crysis 2 instead of Super Mario Bros, then you might as well go for a TI-Nspire or a Casio PRIZM.  (and no, calculators can't run Crysis, unless it both came out on OnLive and that OnLive was ported to the TI-Nspire)

-The TI-84+ has by far the largest amount of ways to program it (Grammer, Axe, TI-BASIC, ASM libs + TI-BASIC, ASM and the less popular C, RPL, EzASM and TI-Power) and is quite easy to program in certain languages, but it has the lowest hardware specs.

-The TI-89 is the same way, but almost nobody program for it anymore.

-The TI-Nspire only has Lua, ASM and C for game programming, TI-Nspire BASIC being extremely limited for most games), but it's the most powerful platform (it even has a Game Boy Advance emulator and can run Doom). It's also pretty locked down so if you have the latest OS it is very hard to use ASM and C programs.

-The Casio PRIZM can do Lua, ASM and C, along with TI-BASIC, but non-ASCII graphics in Casio BASIC are slow on it. It's not as popular on Omnimaga for programming but a bunch of members got one and it has quite a lot of potential.

-The FX-9860G is also quite good, but about 90% of the programming community is French, so barely anybody use it on Omnimaga. It has the same languages as the PRIZM if I remember.

Personally I prefer the TI-84 Plus, because it has the largest audience and library of programming. Also it can be quite entertaining to push the small hardware to its limits.

Just wanted to remind you guys that in his original post he asked which was best for programming on calc. I think hands down you have to say that it's the ti-83+ series(ti-83+/se ti-84+/se. You have basic,asm,axe,grammer, plus tons of libs to use(xlib, celtic 3,batlib etc). It's also the platform people are most familiar with.

Just curious, which is better? Casio Prizm or fx-9860GII (or fx-9860GII SD)?

The Prizm by far. But I also like the 68k. If you buy one, then I'll be happy.

The thing with the 86k is that the community is rather dead, I just got one for calculus and want to know now how to program it aside of BASIC