Slide 5.a: Scripting

Scripting

A scripting language is commonly embedded into a host application and given certain abilities to control and specialize the behavior of said host application. Most scripting languages are typically interpreted and can be typed directly from a keyboard.

In the past, a fundamental change has been occurring in the way people write computer programs. The change is a transition from system programming languages such as C or C++ to scripting languages such as Perl or Tcl.

System programming languages were designed for building data structures and algorithms from scratch. They are usually strongly typed to help manage complexity.

Scripting languages are designed for gluing: They assume the existence of a set of powerful components and are intended for connecting components. They are typeless to simplify connections among components and provide rapid application development.

Scripting languages are designed to automate frequently used tasks that usually involve calling or passing commands to external programs. Many complex application programs allow users to implement custom functions by providing them with built-in languages. More recently many of these applications have chosen to “build in” traditional scripting languages, such as Perl or Visual Basic, but there are quite a few “native” scripting languages still in use. Some of the scripting languages are

awk
ColdFusion
ECMAScript such as JavaScript
Game Maker Language (GML)

Groovy
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Smalltalk
sed
Tcl
VBScript
shell command languages such as the UNIX shell