Python vs. Lisp -- please explain

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Alexander Schmolck <a.schmolck at gmail.com>:
| "Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> writes:
...
|> the only even remotely formal definition I've ever seen is "language with
|> designed to script an existing application, with limited support for handling
|> its own state". 
|
|> Early Tcl and JavaScript are scripting languages, Python is not.
|
| Right. Which shows that by this definition scripting language is not a
| meaningful and useful concept. No one will understand you correctly when you
| refer to "scripting language" and mean only something like the above -- and
| unless you spend a lot of your time talking about early tcl and early
| javascript I doubt you'd need a word for it, either.

Oddly enough, that's what I understand it to mean, too, so you can't
strictly say "no one".

On the other hand, I think it's obvious that a language like Python could
be used for scripting, without having been specifically designed for it as
described above.  There's an ambiguity in the phrase, out of context -
I can say "Python can serve as a scripting language for some applications",
but not "Python is a scripting language!", since its place in the taxonomy
of languages would be somewhere else.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com