| > There are no such things as “serving spoons” — any spoon is a serving spoon if you serve something with it. > There are no such things as “desert spoons” — any spoon is a desert spoon if you eat desert with it. That's not how that works. Eating a dessert is not what makes a dessert spoon what it is. There are multiple criteria which all go into deciding whether a spoon is a desert spoon. For example, dessert spoon cannot be bigger than a table spoon if they are sold as a set. This isn't true for languages. There's nothing to warrant a title of "scripting" to a language. Nothing that would allow you to discern a "scripting language" from a non-scripting one. This terminology lack internal consistency. You could try to define what that means for you, and that could make the definition valid, but there isn't a shared coherent explanation for how to tell a scripting language from a non-scripting. > If everyone understands exactly what they mean when they say “scripting language” Well, here's where you are confused: no, nobody understands what exactly they mean when they say "scripting language". Far from it. It's similar to the situation with fruits and vegetables. Unless you know about the controversy, you might be convinced that you know very well what is a fruit or what is a vegetable, but you will find that not only there isn't a consensus on individual plants, but that there isn't even a consensus on the definition. So, similarly, if you want to be precise, and you want to use the word "fruit", you need to consider the context in which you are using it and make sure that whoever you are talking to knows what sort of a definition you are using. But, it's even worse with "scripting languages" because any of the definitions I know are without merit. They don't describe any useful property of a programming language. Knowing that some language is a scripting language doesn't help you understand what can it be used for or what to expect from it etc. The unfortunate reality is that beyond various aspects of extensions of context-free language group we don't have any useful means for creating of language taxonomy. All we have is a bunch ob b/s often inspired by marketing departments of companies pushing those languages. But we crave taxonomy. It's just the one that we have is worthless... |