TI-BASIC:Conventions

Because there are several people contributing to this wiki, and each person undoubtedly has their own opinion and idea on how to format the content, we have come up with some conventions to use. These conventions are not set in stone, but please try to follow them unless you have a good reason not to. If you have a convention that you think the community should adopt, please add it to this list. (There is a separate set of conventions when making a Command or Routine page.)

Style Conventions

• Page headings are capitalized like an English paper would be capitalized, and paragraphs are four lines or fewer in number.
• Follow the page structure with appropriate page headings, so a main point gets a first level heading and a secondary point gets a second level heading.
• Talk in third person when appropriate or first person when wanting to get the readers' attention.
• Follow the calculator manual when determining how to spell a word: in particular, home screen and graph screen should be spelled as two words instead of homescreen and graphscreen respectively.
• If you need to abbreviate calculator names, use TI-83, TI-83+, TI-83+SE, TI-84+, and TI-84+SE. If you want to refer to all five of the calculators, just use TI-83/84/+/SE.
• When referring to a TI-Basic command:
  • Include the parentheses if the command has one -- e.g., Output( or Abs(.
  • Make the first reference to the command on each page a link.

Code Conventions

• Include a colon (:) at the beginning of each line.
• Don't pad code with unnecessary blank lines or spaces.
• Commands have their closing parentheses, bracket, etc. when not demonstrating an optimization.
• Change all of the TI-Basic tokens that don't display correctly to Unicode or something recognizable (for example, -> is a good substitute for →).
• In the program editor, the calculator screen can only show a set number of characters per line before it will start wrapping the characters around on to the next line. This is not very readable, so all the characters will generally be displayed on the same line (unless there is a large number of characters).