Internet Programming
Scripting languages
1 Introduction Over the last few years the scripting programming languages made a giant leap ahead. About ten years ago they were viewed as an axillar tools, not really suitable for general programming parse. Now they generate a tremendous amount of interest both in academic circles and in the software industry.
The execution speed and memory consumption of scripting languages vs. the traditional languages is studied in. Article presents a historical back- ground of the scripting languages. In a practical case of using the scripting languages in a commercial environment is presented. Finally, presents some trends for the future.
In this overview I first try to define what scripting languages are. Then a classification of the languages based on their application areas is presented. After that, the most popular of scripting languages are presented, and the peculiar features of each one are highlighted. The paper is concluded with the discussion on why scripting languages are important, and what their role is going to be in the future.
2 What are Scripting Languages?
The boundary between the scripting programming languages and the traditional ones is somewhat blurry. However, it is possible to highlight a few characteristics of scripting languages, that, when taken together, could serve as a definition:
• They are interpreted or byte code-interpreted and never compiled to native code
• The memory handling is done by a garbage collector and not by a programmer.
• They include high-level data types, such as lists, associative arrays and so on
• The execution environment can be integrated with the program being written
• The scripting programs (or simply, scripts) can access modules written in lower-level languages, such as C.
Not every scripting language has the whole set of these features? For example, shell scripts cannot access C modules. But it’s a scripting language
1 Introduction Over the last few years the scripting programming languages made a giant leap ahead. About ten years ago they were viewed as an axillar tools, not really suitable for general programming parse. Now they generate a tremendous amount of interest both in academic circles and in the software industry.
The execution speed and memory consumption of scripting languages vs. the traditional languages is studied in. Article presents a historical back- ground of the scripting languages. In a practical case of using the scripting languages in a commercial environment is presented. Finally, presents some trends for the future.
In this overview I first try to define what scripting languages are. Then a classification of the languages based on their application areas is presented. After that, the most popular of scripting languages are presented, and the peculiar features of each one are highlighted. The paper is concluded with the discussion on why scripting languages are important, and what their role is going to be in the future.
2 What are Scripting Languages?
The boundary between the scripting programming languages and the traditional ones is somewhat blurry. However, it is possible to highlight a few characteristics of scripting languages, that, when taken together, could serve as a definition:
• They are interpreted or byte code-interpreted and never compiled to native code
• The memory handling is done by a garbage collector and not by a programmer.
• They include high-level data types, such as lists, associative arrays and so on
• The execution environment can be integrated with the program being written
• The scripting programs (or simply, scripts) can access modules written in lower-level languages, such as C.
Not every scripting language has the whole set of these features? For example, shell scripts cannot access C modules. But it’s a scripting language
References: [5] C.Brabrand,A.Møller,andM.I.Schwartzbach.The<bigwig> project. ACM Trans. on Internet Technology, 2(2):79–114, 2002. [6] A Smalltalk Conference, pages 231–257, Sept. 2004. [9] Ú