python, a scripting language?

[Ian Bicking]

On Sun, 2002-05-12 at 14:14, Erlend J. Leiknes wrote:
> A friend of mine which is a java programmer insists on that python is
> scripting language...
> 
> I belive the term "script" is outdated because of "precompilation".
> The term for a script-language is that you write and run your program as
> text?
> 
> Anyway... I would be happy to hear some reasons why python is not a
> scripting language...

Sure, Python is a scripting language, among other things.  You can
script things in Python -- the basic idea being that you can control and
combine external programs, libraries, or whatever (it's all a little
vague).  There are applications which support scripting via Python (even
though the applications themselves are written in C or another
non-Python language).  That makes Python a scripting language.  Heck, it
doesn't even really matter the the scripted application is written in
Python or not.  

I guess people don't use Java for scripting very often (though I feel
like there are some games that use Java in that way... but I might be
misremembering).  Java isn't appropriate, because it requires so much
boilerplate code to do simple, small actions (which is the basic problem
domain for scripting).

How the language is actually run doesn't mean anything.  Tcl before
version 8 was interpreted textually, after that it was compiled into
bytecodes (like Python) and those bytecodes were interpreted.  The
language acted the same, just the performance changed.  Tcl didn't
become a different language because the interpreter changed.  If it
mattered, then Java would be a Real Programming Language, but JVM
bytecodes would just be a script... but that's silly.  The whole thing
is silly.

Anyway, "script" is just a way of thinking about a program.  It's
informal, it's not something you could use in a taxonomy of programming
languages.  I usually use it when I want to emphasize that the *program*
(not the host language) is simple.

  Ian