Softimage SDK Programmer's Guide > Script Development > Introduction to Scripting in Softimage >

# Supported Scripting Languages

The ActiveX-compliant scripting languages supported by Softimage are:

## VBScript

VBScript is the default scripting language used by Autodesk Softimage. The Softimage installation automatically includes VBScript on Linux and Windows, if it is not already installed. You can also download the Windows version and obtain further documentation from MSDN.

## JScript

JScript is an ActiveX-compliant version of the JavaScript scripting language. The Autodesk Softimage installation automatically includes JScript on Linux and Windows, if it is not already installed. You can also download the Windows version and obtain further documentation from MSDN.

Important

MainWin, the Win32 emulator used to run on Linux, currently only supports version 3 of JScript. This is the version of JScript that was supported in Internet Explorer 4.

Support for error trapping (try/catch) was only added to the JScript language in version 5.

## Python

Python ActiveX Scripting is a version of the Python scripting language that supports ActiveX. Mark Hammond's script extensions for Python are required for Python ActiveX to work in Softimage and are bundled in a module called pywin32 (formerly called win32all or win32com).

Softimage installs Python and the pywin32 extensions automatically:

- For Windows and Linux, the version of Python is v2.7.3.

- The version of the pywin32 extensions for both Windows and Linux is v217.

Note

- If you want to use a different version of Python than the one that is installed with Softimage, you can set the location of the Python directory to use with the PYTHONPATH environment variable.
- Some of the scripts written for Python 2.7 might not be compatible with Python 3.x . To make your scripts future-proof, you can set the WARNPYTHON3K environment variable to 1 to warn you when the code is not compatible with Python 3.x.

For more information on using Python with the Softimage SDK, see the Python Scripting section.