Many people in this thread have said things like: > Interpreted? Compiled? Scripting language?
Let me quote from the preface to "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide" by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt (aka "the pickaxe book"). ---------- In the old days, the distinction between languages was simple: they were either compiled, like C or Fortran, or interpreted, like BASIC. Compiled languages gave you speed and low-level access; interpreted languages were higher-level but slower. Times change, and things aren't that simple anymore. Some language designers have taken to calling their creations "scripting languages." By this, we guess they mean that their languages are interpreted and can be used to replace batch files and shell scripts, orchestrating the behavior of other programs and the underlying operating system. Perl, TCL, and Python have all been called scripting languages. What exactly *is* a scripting language? Frankly we don't know if it's a distinction worth making. ---------- I've made several attempts to sound intelligent in this thread, and each time, I bailed out before hitting the Post button. I keep coming back to the conclusion that Thomas and Hunt said it better than I possibly could. BTW, if like Python and haven't looked at Ruby, it's worth a glance. If Python can be called similar to Lisp, then Ruby is even more so. I'm not fond of Ruby's perlesqe syntax, but I like many of the fundamental ideas. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list