Novel Thoughts on Scripting and Languages

[Tim Cargile]

Martin Christensen <knightsofspamalot-factotum at gvdnet.dk> wrote in message news:<87of6r8hne.fsf at gvdnet.dk>...
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> >>>>> "Terry" == Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> writes:
> Terry> I think it's "scripting" if it relies heavily on external
> Terry> applications, which you call more or less directly.
> 
> I once saw a pragmatic definition to the effect that it's scripting if
> it's practical to write a one-liner (or equivalent) that'll solve a
> useful ad hoc problem.
> 
> The way most people use the word 'script' seems to indicate that it
> should be a small program that solves a small problem (not to say that
> it's of little value). Contrast this to 'application', which indicates
> larger size.
> 
> It tends to be more difficult to define what a 'scripting language'
> is, and I'm not even sure how much sense that term makes, even though
> I occasionally use the word myself. In my experience, when people talk
> about scripting languages they are thinking of one or both of two
> properties of such languages: 1) that they make writing scripts easy
> than other languages and 2) that they make writing large applications
> more difficult than in other languages.
> 
> These are purely pragmatic 'definitions'. I'm not pretending that
> they're even very clever or useful.
> 
> Martin
> 
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> Homepage:       http://www.cs.auc.dk/~factotum/
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My first thoughts are:  Can I 'vi/view/less' it, do I have to
wait for a compile to 'run' it, how fast will it 'run',
where is the source code and how crazy is it, and do I
really want to get involved with this?  Pragmatic hings like that.

I try to use the term 'shell executable' instead of 'shell script'.
Following this, would a '*.py' with a '#!...' as the first line
be a 'python executable'?  Then would a '*.py' script without
the '#!...' and the '*.pyo' files be 'python interpretables'?

Tim



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