Software/net.loadbang.shado/Tutorials/Hello World We kick off by writing a simple script which prints "Hello World." to the Max window. The Max window is a console for Max status and error messages; you can open it by selecting "Max Window" from the "Window" menu, or typing Command-M (Mac) or Control-M (Windows). Since we're going to create a Python script file, we need a decent text editor, ideally one which understands the Python language and can do colour highlighting. On the Mac, I recommend the free {link:TextWrangler|http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/}. (Recommendations for Windows would be welcome.) This is our "Hello World" script: {code:python} ''' This is a script which prints "Hello World" to the Max window. ''' print "Hello World." {code} This script has two parts. The first is the ~~documentation string~~, a comment describing what the script does (the comment is contained within triplets of single-quote characters): {code:python} ''' This is a script which prints "Hello World" to the Max window. ''' {code} The second part is the the actual one-line script statement itself: {code:python} print "Hello World." {code} Create a file containing this script, and save it with a name like "HelloWorld.py" in the directory which contains ~~shado-workbench.PLACE\_HOLDER~~. Now click the workbench button labelled "list text files". You should see ~~HelloWorld.py~~ in the dropdown menu. When you select ~~HelloWorld.py~~, two things should happen: - The "about" text area in the workbench will show the documentation comment for the script - The message "Hello World." will appear in the Max window That's basically it: the script has done its job, and has now finished executing. We haven't yet communicated with the monome, or attempted to use the ~~shado~~ library: that comes next. 1 Further Reading There is a long and detailed Python tutorial {link:here|http://docs.python.org/tutorial/}. I recommend bookmarking it for future reference. (It refers to Python version 2.6; the workbench's Java-based Python interpreter is at version 2.2, but the language differences should be minor.) There is some discussion of documentation strings {link:here|http://docs.python.org/tutorial/controlflow.html#tut-docstrings}. 2009-01-17 21:27:47.0 2009-01-17 21:27:47.0