Thanks for the reply.

I had asked because I was thinking of getting some small device like a PDA or programmable calculator, to use to write small programs for fun and possibly actual use, when I'm not with my laptop.

I am not sure if any PDAs or such calculators are still made these days. I have googled some, but so far did not find any, IIRC. So I may have to buy a used calculator or PDA, if I can find a model I like.

I used to have 2 different Palm PDA models earlier, first a V and then a Zire, but I never did any programming with them, although I do remember trying to use Pippy, a Python 2.x version ported to the Palm. But it used to crash all the time, so I could not really do any programming on it, unfortunately.

HP 's graphing calculators are the best, but they can be very expensive.

Every major calculator manufacturer makes modern back-lit full-color graphing calculators, like HP's Prime, TI's Nspire, and Casio's ClassWiz, but they don't have the charm of reflective LCDs.

The best bang for your buck is probably a Casio FX 7400, 9750 or 9860 GIII series, which have Python interpreters. If you want something more fun, albeit only programmable in BASIC, Casio's CFX have an oddball color display that doesn't use subpixels. (See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLew3Dd3IBA)