[Tutor] when string,join won't work

[Deirdre Saoirse]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, emack wrote:

> I don't know what "scripting" *really* means.  There seem to be
> various ideas about its meaning.  I programmed in ASM, SAP [old
> IBM704], SDS metasymbol, fortran, jovial, cssl, pdp mach., etc., [not
> to mention analog computers], for almost 30 years and the term
> scripting never came up.  But search engines now often associate
> scripting with with Python as well as Java, Perl, PHP, ....  Of course
> these terms never came up either when I was a programmer.  Neither did
> "object oriented language" and seldom UNIX.  I'm amazed that we got
> the Apollo off the ground!  I worry that you guys apparently haven't
> come up with a consensus.

Oh, there's a consensus. :)

You *can* write scripts with Python, but it's not a scripting language.
For the same reasons, Java's not a scripting language. Both are
high-level, interpreted, object-oriented languages.

Scripting languages include: any shell (bash, tcsh, ksh), awk, sed, and
perl (which is really awk on steroids). PHP really started as a set of
add-ons for perl, but I find it much more C-like than Perl-like. Still,
its intent is as a scripting language; when trying to use it for more
general problems, I've always been frustrated enough that I started over
in Python.

-- 
_Deirdre      *      http://www.sfknit.org      *      http://www.deirdre.net 
"We have an open door policy." -- Sheridan
"And an open airlock policy." -- Ivanova