Python is the best and most popular general purpose scripting language; the universal scripting language

[Richard Krehbiel]

Roy Smith wrote:
> rstephens at vectron.com (Ron Stephens) wrote:
> 
>>Python is the best and most popular general purpose scripting
>>language.
> 
> 
> Which raises the question, exactly what makes something a "scripting" 
> langauge?  When I tell people I do Python, they often say something 
> like, "that's a scripting language, right?".  My usual response is 
> something along the lines of "Well, I suppose that depends on who you 
> ask" and I'm not sure what to say after that.
> 
> So, what makes something a "scripting language" as opposed to a 
> "programming language"?

There isn't one big thing that makes the distinction, but there are "clues:"

Scripting Languages are "interpreted", not compiled to machine code. 
(Having a JIT engine like Psyco doesn't change my opinion on this; the 
code deployed is the source, or an intermediate form like .pyc.)

Scripting languages do not have variable type declaration statements. 
Variables in scripting languages are dynamically-typed, and hold 
whatever type you assign to them.

Scripting languages put a lot of emphasis on string manipulation, and 
usually have regular-expression support built in.  They usually have a 
"big raw string literal" syntax, by which a string literal spanning 
multiple lines and containing most of the usual escape characters can be 
expressed simply.