applications language

1 definition found

applications language - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  Ousterhout's dichotomy
  applications language
  Ousterhout's fallacy
  Ousterhout's false dichotomy
  system programming language
  
     <language> John Ousterhout's division of high-level languages
      into "system programming languages" and "scripting
     languages".  This distinction underlies the design of his
     language Tcl.
  
     System programming languages (or "applications languages") are
     strongly typed, allow arbitrarily complex data structures,
     and programs in them are compiled, and are meant to operate
     largely independently of other programs.  Prototypical system
     programming languages are C and Modula-2.
  
     By contrast, scripting languages (or "glue languages") are
     weakly typed or untyped, have little or no provision for
     complex data structures, and programs in them ("scripts")
     are interpreted.  Scripts need to interact either with other
     programs (often as glue) or with a set of functions provided
     by the interpreter, as with the file system functions
     provided in a UNIX shell and with Tcl's GUI functions.
     Prototypical scripting languages are AppleScript, C Shell,
     MS-DOS batch files and Tcl.
  
     Many believe that this is a highly arbitrary dichotomy, and
     refer to it as "Ousterhout's fallacy" or "Ousterhout's false
     dichotomy".  While strong-versus-weak typing, data structure
     complexity, and independent versus stand-alone might be said
     to be unrelated features, the usual critique of Ousterhout's
     dichotomy is of its distinction of compilation versus
     interpretation, since neither semantics nor syntax depend
     significantly on whether code is compiled into
     machine-language, interpreted, tokenized, or
     byte-compiled at the start of each run, or any mixture of
     these.  Many languages fall between being interpreted or
     compiled (e.g. Lisp, Forth, UCSD Pascal, Perl, and
     Java).  This makes compilation versus interpretation a
     dubious parameter in a taxonomy of programming languages.
  
     (2002-05-28)