Hello World

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 TextWrangler. (Recommendations for Windows would be welcome.)

This is our "Hello World" script:

'''
This is a script which prints "Hello World"
to the Max window.
'''
print "Hello World."

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):

'''
This is a script which prints "Hello World"
to the Max window.
'''

The second part is the the actual one-line script statement itself:

print "Hello World."

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

Further Reading

There is a long and detailed Python tutorial here. 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 here.