Learning Petit Lesson 1: Getting Started and the Console

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Learning Petit Lesson 1: Getting Started and the Console
This introductory tutorial is intended for absolute beginners with no programming experience - programmers with any experience will probably want to skip it unless they're totally new to BASIC (although I recommend checking the keyboard shortcuts for some 'secret' ones). After explaining the basics of the Petit Computer interface, I will introduce you to fundamental programming concepts and then explain how they relate to Petit Computer.

The interface
When you first launch Petit Computer you will be taken to the home menu, which has "Write Program", "View Gallery", and "File Management". Since these tutorials focus on programming, you will want to launch "Write Program".

Run Mode
This will take you to a black screen with white text at the top; this is called a console (or terminal), a place where you interact with the computer through text. This is referred to as "Run Mode" in the software. Run Mode is a good place to start learning, because when no program is running you can type in a command and when you press enter it will execute the command immediately. We will get to this soon.

On the bottom screen you can see they keyboard panel and some other buttons. The five black function keys along the top, although they look like menu buttons, actually just paste a command where you are typing. The X in the upper right returns you to the home menu. Along the bottom you will see the Help, RUN, and EDIT keys. The Help key takes you into the Help screen (feel free to check it out, but it is poorly translated from Japanese, extremely technical, and will be almost useless to anyone who has never programmed before) The RUN key takes you to the Run Mode screen, where you are now. The EDIT key takes you to the code editing window, where you can write a program. Switch to EDIT Mode.

Edit Mode
Edit mode is straightforward. On the upper screen you can see a series of numbered arrows. These numbers are line numbers; each line can contain some code. When you type, the text you are typing will appear where the cursor is located on the current line. Later on I will go over keyboard shortcuts, including some that aren't listed in the Help! Return to Run Mode

Getting started programming
Almost every beginning programming tutorial will have you start with "Hello, World", so let's begin there.

Type  into the console and press enter.
 * 

As you can see, the text you entered was repeated on the console. PRINT is a command, which means it tells Petit Computer to do something - in this case, display text on the screen. is a string, which is a written message composed of characters you can find on the keyboard. Let's look at a few more lines of code and then get into definitions.