One of the newest members of Casio's graphing calculator family, the Algebra FX 2.0 is certainly a notable machine. Behind a pleasant keyboard and a crisp monochrome display is a fairly capable graphing calculator with symbolic algebra capability.

"Fairly", I said, and with reason. The Algebra FX 2.0 certainly has most, if not all, the features one would expect from a multifunction graphing scientific calculator. Yet I feel somewhat uninspired after spending a few hours playing with this device. Here is why.

The Algebra FX 2.0, like Casio's other graphing calculator products, is obviously an education-oriented device. And it shows (and no, I don't mean that as a compliment.) When you first turn on the machine, you'll be presented with a bewildering set of menu options: "RUN", STAT", "RECUR", "CONIC", "EQUA", "CAS", just to name a few examples. Selecting any one of these options activates the corresponding calculator mode, where you can perform the appropriate functions.

What is missing is functional integration. This is where HP's graphing calculators continue to excel (and with the possible exception of the TI-89 and TI-92, remain in a class of their own.) The idea is simple: a multifunction calculator should let me manipulate a symbol the same as a number. It should let me perform arithmetic functions on numbers as well as vectors, matrices, algebraic expressions, indeed any object for which the function is defined. Apart from convenience, there's a significant pedagogical aspect to this: the beauty of mathematics is not that it consists of dozens of unrelated topics, but that everything is interrelated.

In this respect, the Algebra FX 2.0 is better than most of its predecessors; for instance, complex number support is nicely integrated with the rest of the calculator's functions. But it's still nowhere close to what the HP-48 family or the TI-89 have to offer in terms of feature integration.

Of course if your idea of "education" is standardized tests, if what you're teaching is not mathematics but multiple choice skills, calculators like the Algebra FX 2.0 may indeed be the ideal classroom tools. And I should probably count my blessings that when I was in high school, mathematics was still taught with pencil and paper, or chalk and blackboard. I never thought I'd one day hear myself argue against the use of calculators in the classroom but then again, there was a time when I never would have thought that one day, there'll be calculators whose sole apparent purpose is to help students obtain the highest score in braindead tests. Oh well.

The actual programming model of the Algebra FX 2.0 is not that different from its predecessors. Some changes make the resulting programs appear more like "structured" programs: for instance, conditional statements now appear inside If-Then-Else-IfEnd blocks, and loop constructs (For, While) are also available. While it makes programs more readable, I think I found the old programming model more practical, yet again proving that easy-to-learn is not the same as easy-to-use.

The following example utilizes the calculator's 15-digit internal precision to compute the logarithm of the Gamma function to a high degree of accuracy. In complex mode, the program correctly computes its result for any argument that is not zero or a negative integer, for which the Gamma function remains undefined.

Rad
"X=":?->X
1->S
If ReP X<0
Then
  -1->S
  -Conjg X->X
IfEnd
ln (2.5066282756348+225.525584619175/X-268.295973841305/(X+1)+
    80.9030806934623/(X+2)-5.00757863970518/(X+3)+
    1.14684895434781/(100X+400))+(X-.5)ln (X+4.65)-X-4.65->G
If S<0
Then
  ln (-π/X/sin πX)-G->G
IfEnd
G