On Sun, 23 May 2010, Pedro Lopes wrote:
The truth is with the newest developments, scripting is of course gaining a new meaning. By old "meanings" a scripting lang would have usually characteristics like:
- being interpreted from source code (traditional langs are compiled as you know)
BASIC is a traditional language that is interpreted from source code (or from a kind of byte-jcode that is a simple search-and-replace on the source code). But as early as the eighties, there was a compiler for it.
LISP is a traditional language that is interpreted, yet became quite compiled as an option. It's quite notable as there is a full interpreter of itself in the standard library that can be used by compiled programs, at runtime (or compile time too).
- being separate components from main application and so forth (but this
has gradually changed nowadays!)
From what main application ?
One does not usually call "shell scripting" "shell programming", simply because its interpreted scritps (like so many other langs),
What is usually called "shell" is a series of programming languages that were born with the initial goal of providing a main interface to the OS and thus have a special focus on managing other programs.
but OF COURSE when you're scripting your programming... :)
No idea what that means...
An interesting description could be borrowed Ousterhout from where he states: "they are intended primarily for plugging together components",
Most any programming language is about plugging together components. a function is a component, a variable is a component, an object is a component. (nothwithstanding the specific use of the word made for "component-based programming"). The size and complexity of components alluded to in the sentence "they are intended primarily for plugging together components" is only there to say that real tough code is made in real tough languages and that for the wimpy stuff you can use wimpy languages.
There is a very relevant discussion to be made about how Pd fits in all of this, if it is to be considered as a "scripting language".
but then again... they (scripting langs) have evolved so largely that they have surpassed that in many ways. But he was saying this in 98[1]...
So what ?... I've seen a lot of Tcl apps in 1997 and most of them didn't have to do with being the house pet of a Real Application. It's ok to have people like Ousterhout talk about why they first invented a language, but in many cases it doesn't have anything to do with the nature of the thing, and you can see that by how quickly its users can ignore the original intent. Ousterhout was writing with his own vocabulary about a reality that it wasn't fitting in.
He even confused strong typing with an API design that happens to not care for concise application code, lack of default args, lack of keyword args, etc.
I used to think that this article is really mind-blowing, but that's because I was a teen undergrad who was in the process of switching from DOS to UNIX. Nowadays I have trouble reading it because it makes me want to rewrite the article.
Then maybe the whole thing was just a plot to popularise alternate languages with a crowd of programmers that had pretty narrow views about what constitutes a Real Programming Language. That's how one needs to start to distinguish between Programming and Scripting.
it is funny to see how it all evolved. There's another usual name for this "glue code" that some of my oldest teachers used to say in my first years of college,
The concept of "glue code" is as ill-defined as the concept of "pseudo code"... vague ideas based on impressions and on language politics. "pseudo code" usually meant anything that looked like C, PASCAL and all the competing languages of the time, usually made with a syntax slightly different from anything in order to avoid favorising any language over the other. It was a kind of neutral ground for sharing research in a fragmented world of dozens of languages and dozens of CPU models. As such, "pseudo code" was a political game. Now, I suppose you can imagine too a politically-defined concept of "glue code"...?
True true, there's a lot of ecma compliant stuff out there, but still too esoteric for me because apart from AS and js haven't really learned any of them...
ISO-9660 (CD-ROM filesystem) is a well-known ECMA standard but it is not well-known that it's an ECMA standard. It was first defined by ECMA then adopted by ISO.
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