Scripting language

A scripting language or script language is a programming language that supports scripts.

Description

Scripts are programs written for a run-time environment that can interpret source code.

This is by contrast with programs which required the source code to be compiled into an executable program.

Uses for scripting languages

Environments that can be automated through scripting include software applications, web pages within a web browser, the shells of operating systems (OS), and embedded systems.

A scripting language can be viewed as a domain-specific language for a particular environment; in the case of scripting an application, this is also known as an extension language.

Scripting languages are also sometimes referred to as very high-level programming languages, as they operate at a high level of abstraction, or as control languages, particularly for job control languages on mainframes.

The term "scripting language" is also used loosely to refer to dynamic high-level general-purpose language, such as Perl, Tcl, and Python, with the term "script" often used for small programs (up to a few thousand lines of code) in such languages, or in domain-specific languages such as the text-processing languages sed and AWK.

Some of these languages were originally developed for use within a particular environment, and later developed into portable domain-specific or general-purpose languages.

Conversely, many general-purpose languages have dialects that are used as scripting languages. This article discusses scripting languages in the narrow sense of languages for a specific environment; dynamic, general-purpose, and high-level languages are discussed at those articles.

The spectrum of scripting languages ranges from very small and highly domain-specific languages to general-purpose programming languages used for scripting.

Examples

Standard examples of scripting languages for specific environments include:

• Bash, for the Unix or Unix-like operating systems
• ECMAScript (JavaScript), for web browsers
• Visual Basic for Applications, for Microsoft Office applications.

Lua is a language designed and widely used as an extension language.

Pythonis a general-purpose language that is also commonly used as an extension language, while ECMAScript is still primarily a scripting language for web browsers, but is also used as a general-purpose language.

The Emacs Lisp dialect of Lisp (for the Emacs editor) and the Visual Basic for Applications dialect of Visual Basic are examples of scripting language dialects of general-purpose languages.

Game scripting

Some game systems, notably the Second Life virtual world and the Trainz franchise of Railroad simulators have been extensively extended in functionality by scripting extensions.

See also

• Client-side scripting
• Computer program
• Computer programming
• Computer science
• General-purpose programming language
• Programming language
• Server-side scripting

External links

• Scripting language @ Wikipedia