Python vs. Lisp -- please explain

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Alexander Schmolck a écrit :
> Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.quelquechose at free.quelquepart.fr> writes:
> 
> 
>>DH a écrit :
>>(snip)
>>
>>>It is by design. Python is dynamically typed. It is essentially an
>>>interpreted scripting language like javascript or ruby or perl,
>>
>>
>>It's not a "scripting" language, and it's not interpreted.
> 
> 
> Of course it is. What do you think happens to the bytecode?

Ok, then what do you think happens to 'machine' code ?

"interpreted" usually means "no compilation, all parsing etc redone at 
each execution", which is not the case with a bytecode/vm based 
implementation.

> And if python
> isn't a scripting language, then what on earth is? 

bash is a scripting language for *n*x systems. javascript is a scripting 
language for web browsers. VBScript is a scripting language for  MS 
applications.

> You might want to argue about whether scriping language is a meaningful and
> useful concept,

A scripting languagee is a language whose main purpose is to be embbeded 
in an application to provide the user a way of programmaticaly automate 
some tedious tasks.

Now you could of course argue about what is an application...

> but it's really hard to see how you could talk about "scripting
> languages" without including python.

Ho, really ? How many applications using Python as scripting language ? 
And how many applications written in Python ?

Python *can* be used as a scripting language (and is not too bad at it), 
but it *is* not a scripting language.