An open-source, cross-platform interpreter for the Microsoft Small Basic language.

The goal is to create a more stable and bug-free implementation of the language than Microsoft's proprietary IDE, that will work in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Ubuntu, at the very least). Currently, the interpreter works for a subset of the language features, with the most notable omission being multimedia support.

PyMSB is currently being tested on Windows 7 and Linux Mint. Mac OS X testing will wait until development is at least feature-complete on Windows and Linux.

1. Install Python 3.

   • On Linux, use the command sudo apt-get install python3 in the terminal.
   • On Windows, download the latest version of Python 3 from https://www.python.org/download/, and run the downloaded setup file.

2. Install PyMSB.

   • On Linux, open a terminal in the same folder as setup.py and run the command sudo python3 setup.py install.
   • On Windows, open Command Prompt with administrative permissions, navigate to the same folder as setup.py and run the command python setup.py install.
     • You may need to add python to the system PATH variable.

(More instructions to come soon...)

After following steps #1 and #2 to install PyMSB, the following Python script will print Hello World!:

import pymsb

code = """
TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello world!")
"""

i = pymsb.Interpreter()
i.execute_code(code)

Of course, future instructions will describe how to invoke the PyMSB interpreter as a standalone program without having to write a Python script, and be able to execute the contents of a file containing only Microsoft Small Basic code.

Efficiency.

Eventually, Small Basic could become a subset of another language that supports features like function arguments for user-defined functions. This future language is tentatively named Small Medium.