Category:Scripting languages

From GTALUG

Scripting Languages

These languages have been particularly popular on Unix (though Wikipedia:REXX holds a somewhat similar position in the hearts of mainframe folk). Traditionally, characteristics of a scripting language are:

• Programs are kept in plain text form, with no need to compile into some sort of "object" form before running them.

• Often (particularly for "shell" languages) there is an interpreter to provide an environment the user may interact with.

• Often they are used to "script" (in a manner analagous to the script for a play) the activities of the "real actors," those being compiled programs in the environment.

• Often they provide a somewhat domain-specific language; command shells like [[Bash], for instance, primarily provide features to manipulate environment, and to name and manage files and processes.

In the "old days," you would write a shell script to control execution of some set of processes, calling programs written in C or awk or sed that would do the "heavy lifting."

As languages like Perl and Python have grown more popular, they have also been augmented with more and more functionality including powerful sets of data structures and libraries to access system functionality more directly, with the result that relatively complex applications may be written in such languages without needing to invoke external programs such as awk. As a result, the characteristics described above are not universally true for all use cases of scripting languages.

Articles in category "Scripting languages"

There are 14 articles in this category.

B Bash M Meetings:2001-06 Meetings:2004-04 Meetings:2004-09

M cont. Meetings:2004-11 Meetings:2005-08 P PHP Perl PyGTA

P cont. Python T TORPUG Tcl Toronto Perl Mongers Z Zsh