I believe there are 4 ways this could go depending on a few factors...
If you want to use libs and you are on the 83/84 monochromes, you can expr(Strχ then NumToString that and then check the length of the string and work with that.
If you are on the CE, you can do something similar without the use of libs by using
ToString CE by MateoConLechuga
If you want to do it in pure basic (not suggested) Since the only thing that will affect the length of your string in a quadratic equation is the order of magnitude of each number, you could always, just check the order of magnitude of each variable with a repeat loop that increments a denominator by 1,10,100,etc. until it finds one that gives an answer≤1, however this may not be very efficient at all and would not work for decimals. For decimals, you could always round the number off to a certain precision to display it (not necessairely for the actual calculations
) which is what I did once (until I ended up changing it) but it is a big mess and would slow it down even more.
I know nothing of ASM, but I'm pretty sure there is a command that returns the actual length of a string rather than the number of tokens. Something like
this maybe? But I'm assuming you are like me and don't know ASM and would therefore need someone to help you create/assemble such a program (if it even exists haha) hopefully someone with better knowledge of this will pop in and either tell me I'm dead wrong or help you out
Also, you may want to note that there are literally thousands of quadratic solver programs, and at least some of them are bound to have solved this issue. You may want to have a look at some of those. Looking at the work of others is to me the best way one can learn ti-basic