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Introduction To Integrative Programming and Technologies Part 2

The document discusses scripting languages and their characteristics. Scripting languages are typically interpreted rather than compiled, support dynamic typing over static typing, have little support for complex data structures, and are used to automate tasks within a runtime environment like an application. Some key points made are that the spectrum of scripting languages is broad, ranging from domain-specific to general purpose, and that scripting languages have evolved from early uses like job control to modern uses like browser-based scripts. Examples of popular scripting languages are provided.

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Arnel Nieto
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135 views

Introduction To Integrative Programming and Technologies Part 2

The document discusses scripting languages and their characteristics. Scripting languages are typically interpreted rather than compiled, support dynamic typing over static typing, have little support for complex data structures, and are used to automate tasks within a runtime environment like an application. Some key points made are that the spectrum of scripting languages is broad, ranging from domain-specific to general purpose, and that scripting languages have evolved from early uses like job control to modern uses like browser-based scripts. Examples of popular scripting languages are provided.

Uploaded by

Arnel Nieto
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Introduction to

Integrative
Programming and
Technologies
SCRIPTING (SCRIPT LANGUAGE)
Scripting

John Ousterhout’s dichotomy: high-level programming languages tend


to fall into – scripting languages vs. system programming languages //
programming in the small vs programming in the large.

Application Languages Scripting Languages


- Typed statically - Typed dynamically
- Support creating complex data - Little or no provision for complex
structures data structures
- Compiled into machine code - interpreted
Stand-alone – operate largely
independently of other programs
Scripting

 Scripting – coding for a special runtime environment to automate


the execution of tasks; scripts are often interpreted rather than
compiled.

Runtime environments (host program) could refer to: software


applications, webpages within the browser, shell operating systems.
Embedded systems, games
Scripting

 Scripting Languages can loosely refer to dynamic high-level general


purpose interpreted languages (e.g., Perl, Python, Powershell, Tcl)
 The term “Script” commonly refers to small programs (up to few
thousand lines of code) in such dynamic high-level general purpose
interpreted languages
- Some of these languages were developed for use within a
particular environment but have evolved into portable domain-
specific or general-purpose languages.
- Some general purpose languages have dialects that are used
for scripting.
Scripting

 The spectrum for scripting languages is broad

Scripting Languages

Domain-specific
General purpose
language
language
Scripting Languages more examples

 Bash – for unix operating systems (Unix Shell)


 ECMAScript and Javascript – primarily a scripting language for web
browsers but also considered general-purpose
 Visual Basic for Applications (a dialect of Visual Basic) – for MS
Office applications
 Emacs Lisp - a dialect of Lisp for Emacs editor
 Lua – an extension language
 Python – a general-purpose language commonly used as extension
language
 Game systems: e.g., Linden Scripting Language and Trainz are
scripting extensions
Scripting Languages

 Intended to be learned quickly and written as short source code


files
 Simple syntax and semantics – hence called “script”
 Executed from start to finish, no explicit entry point
 Interpreted rather than compiled – although host environments are
usually compiled
 Scripting languages use high-level abstraction – spares users the
coding details of internal variables, data storage, and memory
management
 Scripts can be created or modified by users/developers
History of Scripting

 Used in early mainframe computers (1950s), e.g., JCL (Job Control


Language) that were used to control batch processing of IBM
mainframes
 Interactive shells came in the 1960s with the first time-sharing
systems, they used shell scripts to control the execution of a program
within another program (i.e., the OS Shell)
 Then came the general-purpose scripting languages such as Tcl
and Lua
 Later, software that incorporate scripting languages, e.g., modern
web browsers provide a language for writing extensions and
controlling the browser like Javascript and XUL
Types of Scripting Languages

 Shell Languages/Job control languages


 a large number of scripting languages originated job control
automation
 Start and control the behaviour of system programs
 Editor/ Text processing languages
 A number of text editors support either built-in macros (built into the
editor) or external macro implementation, or both built-in and external
 Glue languages
 Scripts that are used to connect software components
 Adapt different components of code that would otherwise be
incompatible
Types of Scripting language

 GUI scripting languages


 Interact with GUI components like human user would
 Used to automate user actions
 Application-specific scripting languages
 A domain-specific scripting language specialized for a single
application
 Extension/Embeddable languages
 Instead of an application-specific script, there are general-purposes
scripting languages embeddable application programs
 Example: Javascript began and still a scripting language inside Web
browsers but its stardardization ECMAScript made it a general-purpose
embeddable language
Examples of scripting languages
(listed in Wikipedia)
- AppleScript - JCL
- ColdFusion - CoffeeScript
- DCL - Julia
- Embeddable Common Lisp - JScript and JavaScript
- Ecl - Lua
- EarLang - m4
- EXEC - Modern Pascal
- EXEC2 - Perl (5 and 6)
Examples of scripting languages
(listed in Wikipedia)
- PHP - Scheme
- PowerShell - Tcl
- Pure - Unix Shell Scripts (Ksh, csh, bash, sh and others
- Python - Rebol
- VBScript - Red
- Work Flow Language - Rexx
- XSLT - Ruby

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