If you're not too fussy about being up-to-date, you may be able to find a redundant system for free (the university I work at gave away several redundant machines a year or two back and they had trouble getting rid of them as people didn't want 15 inch monitors and old pentium based machines). If you don't need portability and want to do programming on the cheap, an old desktop running Linux would be much more powerful than any calculator and should be cheap. You certainly can write code for say Time Value of Money calculations (if not already included) and even a simple net-listed circuit simulator would be possible but it would be much easier to use a conventional language such as c on an old laptop running Linux. The screens are designed for a portable device not for looking at listings. The keyboards are good for entering numbers but not for writing lines of code. The languages available are generally non-standard and are not conducive to writing easy-to-maintain code. It is not so much that they aren't powerful, though because they are aimed at low cost and long battery life they are not powerful, but that it is difficult or inconvenient to enter programs or save them once entered. I have quite a collection of calculators and still use my HP35s a lot and miss my HP48SX which has a missing column of pixels on its display, but I wouldn't recommend them for programming anything but simple calculations.
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