Quoth Alexander Schmolck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: | "Fredrik Lundh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: ... |> the only even remotely formal definition I've ever seen is "language with |> designed to script an existing application, with limited support for handling |> its own state". | |> Early Tcl and JavaScript are scripting languages, Python is not. | | Right. Which shows that by this definition scripting language is not a | meaningful and useful concept. No one will understand you correctly when you | refer to "scripting language" and mean only something like the above -- and | unless you spend a lot of your time talking about early tcl and early | javascript I doubt you'd need a word for it, either.
Oddly enough, that's what I understand it to mean, too, so you can't strictly say "no one". On the other hand, I think it's obvious that a language like Python could be used for scripting, without having been specifically designed for it as described above. There's an ambiguity in the phrase, out of context - I can say "Python can serve as a scripting language for some applications", but not "Python is a scripting language!", since its place in the taxonomy of languages would be somewhere else. Donn Cave, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list