Begin Programming

| KPL

The Intergrated Development Environment (IDE)

After downloading and installing the KPL IDE, you can load the Kid’s Programming Language program. The first thing to do when ever you start a program in KPL is to click the arrow next to ‘Method Main()’.

Screenshot of the KPL IDE

In between ‘Method Main()’ and ‘End Method’ is where we will type our programs.

You will now notice that there is text which reads

// Enter your program code here

the line begins with //, we know that this line of code is only a comment; a piece of code ignored by the compiler when making the program, therefore we can delete this line along with all the other lines beginning with //.

The KPL IDE uses coloured syntax. This is a common feature of IDEs as different types of commands are different colours, for example in KPL, all green lines are comments.

Whenever you have created a program, click the play button at the top of the IDE, which will compile and run your game. When you do this you may sometimes get an error message such as:
"Expected one of the following keywords or symbols : -, &, (,), *,........."
Normally when you get these error messages it is due to incorrect syntax; remember that when programming, you are simply writing code for the machine to process. These instructions must be written exactly as they are built in, therefore spaces must be in the correct place. If you get an error message like this, check that you have put spaces, brackets and quotation marks in the right place.