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
