Introduction:


I use Lego Mindstroms(NXT) robotics kit and I could not find a way to program my bots in python. I pondered about learning the NXT byte code format and writing a backend for the PyPy project. But instead I quickly hacked up a simple translator in couple of hours that enables one to write NXT programs in python like syntax and converts it to NXC.


Is this python really ?

Well it resembles python, but none of the useful syntax is supported yet.

Currently none of the following are supported:
 - Dynamic typing (I don't  think this will ever be supported)
 - No function generators, iterators, imports, lambda functions ect
 - No support for object oriented programming

What is supported:
 - All functions in NXC (Since it is just a wrapper)
 - For, While, if statements.
 - Functions.


One of the big todo items is to do data flow analysis to determine what type each variable is.

 - Only ints and longs for now
 - longs should contain the string "long" in variable name (I know, pretty lame)

To Do:

1) Data Flow Analysis: I have some idea on how to do this. I just need to spend enough time to get this working.
2) Support object oriented programming
3) Add a library of functions so that it becomes very easy program NXT in python


Example:

Here is a line following program in python like language

To generate NXC code, just run
python translate.py <input.py> > output.nxc

Here is the translated NXC code.


Download:

Source:  translate.py

The above file is under Apache license as I used some code from pyJS by James Tauber that converts python to java script. I did not want to write all of the AST walker functions and reuse some existing code.