I started learning about Python 15 days ago and I'm a little bit confused whether it is a programming language or scripting language. I am thinking it is a programming language because it contains Exception, RE, Networking etc. However I thought scripting languages could not contain features like Networking,Exception etc.
There is a basic assumption in your question that there is a difference between between a 'scripting' language and a 'programming' language. Back when the world was young and in the PC world you chose from .exe or .bat, the delineation was simple. Unix systems have always had shell scripts (/bin/sh, /bin/csh, /bin/ksh, etc) and Compiled languages (C/C++/Fortran).
To differentiate roles and responsibilities, the compiled languages (often referred to as 3rd Generation Languages) were seen a 'programming' languages and 'scripting' languages were seen as those that invoked an interpreter (often referred to as 4th Generation Languages). Scripting languages were often used as 'glue' to connect between multiple commands/compiled programs so that the user didn't have to worry about a set of steps in order to carry out their task - they developed a single file, that delineated what steps they wanted to accomplish, and this became a 'script' for anyone to follow.
Various people/groups wrote new interpreters to solve a specific problem domain. awk is one of the better known ones, and it was used mostly for pattern matching and applying a series of data transforms on input. It worked well, but had a limited problem domain. The expansion of that domain was all but impossible because the source code was unavailable. Perl (Larry Wall, principle author/architect) tool scripting to the next level - and developed an interpreter that not only allowed the user to run system commands, manipulate input and output data, supported typeless variables, but also to access Unix system level APIs as functions from within the scripts themselves. It was probably one of the first widely used high level scripting languages. It is with Perl (IMHO) that scripting languages crossed the arbitrary line and added the capabilities of programming languages.
Your question was specifically about Python. Because the python interpreter runs against a text file containing the python code, and that the python code can run anywhere that there is a python interpreter, I would say that it is a scripting language (in the same vein as Perl). You do not need to recompile the user python command file for each different OS/CPU Architecture (as you would with C/C++/Fortran), making it significantly more portable and easier to use.
The Python web site refers to Python as " a remarkably powerful dynamic programming language " (http://www.python.org/about/), so obviously they consider it to be a programming language.
The answer to your question is: YES.
Python is a very powerful, yet learn-to-your-level kind of programming language. you can use it as scripting language or use it as object-oriented programming language. I am learning Python and It is easier to learn.
Python is a programming language. It is an object-oriented programming language with lots of features which do support in development of web applications as well.
"Scripting language" means, according to Wikipedia < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_language >, that "normal users" can write short programs in that language to automate certain tasks in a defined environment. That is possible with Python. It can be embedded into a bigger software package for this purpose. And useful stand-alone Python programs can be as short as a few lines.
But Python can also be used to write complex software that is not changed often. It is a true all-purpose language.
Personally I am writing Python programs to automate my measurements and process data interactively. My measurement program is written in Python *and* uses Python as an internal scripting language: A short piece of Python code is adapted for each measurement and controls which measurements are executed with which parameters in what order. The main code implements these measurements and makes sure data ends up in the right place etc. This main code is not changed so often.
In conclusion, Python is a versatile and powerful language. Unless you write operating systems, you can do pretty much anything with it.
@karsten schulz:-you written a comment that every scripting language is a programming language.But How? Let's consider a scripting language as HTML, DHTML or CSS then, can these scripting language considered as programming language.Thanks.
@Masood shokri:-You also written a comment that Python is a dynamic type language then what does it mean. A language can be either a programming language or it can be a scripting language but simultaneously it can not be both. I am totally confused that whether it is a scripting or programming language.Thanks.
@Karsten Schulz:-I couldn't get you.Can you explained it more so that i can understand it.Another thing is that can you explain me about this line "Every scripting language is a programming language".Last but not the least, if HTML,DHTML... are not scripting language then what they are actually?Thanks.
Python bridges the difference between scripting languages and programming languages. Like Perl and Java, it is interpreted. Unlike Perl, it can be used to write complex general-purpose programs.
A scripting language which takes on the advantages of programming too
@Salman Beg :
HTML could be considered a "description language" : you can use it to describe the content of a page : "there is a blinking red title with big letters that says on the top of the page, followed with italic green text ...". You cannot describe, or write algorithms with it. As pointed out by Karsten, you lack for instance loop controls ("while", "for",... ) or even worse, conditional statements ("if", "else"...).
Now, as the distinction you want to make between programming and scripting... Well, I would say this is a matter of definition and there might not be a clear consensus on that, hence your trouble.
As a verb, *programming* merely means writing programs, that is, code that reflect an algorithm. *Script* usually depicts a small program that does "high level" things such as manipulating directory, files, filenames, or manipulating coma separated content of files. Shell languages such as sh, bash, ksh, csh are good example of scripting languages. but more "complete" languages are considered as scripting languages too, such as Perl.
Somehow, this is the "level" of the language as well as its use that will define it as a scripting language or not. But in any cases, *scripting* IS *programming*.
To finish with, some languages are very well adapted to write complex, efficient and large programs, but are rather poor when it comes to manipulate the content of a file with a few lines of codes. For instance, with C or C++ you can write an operating system, or a computer game; which won't be possible in bash... On the opposite, if you simply want to parse a directory and change the file extension from .jpg to .JPEG, well, you can "script" that in a few shell line, but although it is possible, it is much more painful in C :)
Some people will make the distinction between so called "scripting langages" (those that are adapted to write short programs), and the rest (the ones that are adapted to writing "serious" programs) which they will name "programming languages" ...Although formally speaking, scripting is also programming.
Now, concerning Python; well... as already stated by Dieter, it is well suited for both applications :)
For short: pyton is _both_.
The distinction nowadays is losing its sense.
The sole remaining difference is how we can distribute our programs. Distributing Python source code is ideal for open source releases as the code will be shorter than C code and users will be able to tailor each program to their own needs. On the other hand, you cannot give away Python programs to people who cannot install the Python interpreter on their machines. ( I would not mind learning a simple way to build executables combining a Python or Lua program with its interpreter.)
Some tend to make a division between "compiled" and "interpreted" languages where the latter would be "scripting". Since you can have both types with python (yes you can compile python, but you don't need to) the destinction makes no sense here. Though some of it's features make it as easy to get something running as with most pure scripting languages.
What u want can do with python so don't get confused. I am using python since 2 years for development of networking related topic.
In short, as with any research problem, the answer depends on how you define the question. What is a scripting language? What is a programming language? Are these two sets exclusive? The answers to these questions may vary from person to person.
To me, a scripting language is usually a language which allows the end-user some limited programmability to improve an application. In this sense, JavaScript is a scripting language. Python could be embedded into an application this way, but that would usually be done with something like Lua. So in my vocabulary, Python would be a programming language. On the other hand, as has been mentioned, many people say that a scripting language is an interpreted one (I presume this is because of the performance hit that is associated with the interpreter, or perhaps because the files themselves are often called scripts). Using this definition, of course it is a scripting language. But a script is a program with a specific context in mind (for example a batch file on windows is a script that is designed to execute other programs or create/delete files and directories, etc.).
In the standard implementation, the Python source is compiled to byte code, which then is executed by the Python Virtual Machine. These technical details are however rather irrelevant: Python is a full-fledged programming language.
There is a basic assumption in your question that there is a difference between between a 'scripting' language and a 'programming' language. Back when the world was young and in the PC world you chose from .exe or .bat, the delineation was simple. Unix systems have always had shell scripts (/bin/sh, /bin/csh, /bin/ksh, etc) and Compiled languages (C/C++/Fortran).
To differentiate roles and responsibilities, the compiled languages (often referred to as 3rd Generation Languages) were seen a 'programming' languages and 'scripting' languages were seen as those that invoked an interpreter (often referred to as 4th Generation Languages). Scripting languages were often used as 'glue' to connect between multiple commands/compiled programs so that the user didn't have to worry about a set of steps in order to carry out their task - they developed a single file, that delineated what steps they wanted to accomplish, and this became a 'script' for anyone to follow.
Various people/groups wrote new interpreters to solve a specific problem domain. awk is one of the better known ones, and it was used mostly for pattern matching and applying a series of data transforms on input. It worked well, but had a limited problem domain. The expansion of that domain was all but impossible because the source code was unavailable. Perl (Larry Wall, principle author/architect) tool scripting to the next level - and developed an interpreter that not only allowed the user to run system commands, manipulate input and output data, supported typeless variables, but also to access Unix system level APIs as functions from within the scripts themselves. It was probably one of the first widely used high level scripting languages. It is with Perl (IMHO) that scripting languages crossed the arbitrary line and added the capabilities of programming languages.
Your question was specifically about Python. Because the python interpreter runs against a text file containing the python code, and that the python code can run anywhere that there is a python interpreter, I would say that it is a scripting language (in the same vein as Perl). You do not need to recompile the user python command file for each different OS/CPU Architecture (as you would with C/C++/Fortran), making it significantly more portable and easier to use.
The Python web site refers to Python as " a remarkably powerful dynamic programming language " (http://www.python.org/about/), so obviously they consider it to be a programming language.
The answer to your question is: YES.
It's both...Python is often used as a scripting language, but is also used in a wide range of non-scripting contexts..
Hi there! You ask interesting question... as I see when I look at the answers... I think the words "programming" or "scripting" are just confising in the case. A language (that is intended to be used for computer) is a set of rules and notations (so called syntax and semantics) that provide possibility to describe an algorithm in a form that can be then transformed in the form that can be executed with/on a computer platform. Uhh...
There are several aproaches to achive the goal (computer execution). The main two ones are: a) with a compiler (that produces the machine code, ) and b) with an interpreter (that just executes the text string by string with special pieces of code the interpreter has inside).
The way of execution is very weakly connected with language (syntax/semantics). You can find interpreters for the C language (i.e. for programs written in C), and there are compilers for the java language, and I guess there are compilers for the Python language. But yes, there are languages that do not allow execution within the interpreter model.
Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_language . But key point is the following: the words "scripting language" means just "a set of rules to write text that can be executed by an interpreter".
And no need to say that any "scripting" language is a programming language by definition.
I have to admit I started using it when I read that its a scripting language...
It's a programming language but a lot of people uses it like a script language (some use it like Perl in Bioinformatics (Biopython))
I don't see any meaningful distinction between the two terms except:
- in the bad old days, when computers were slow, compilation took a noticable amount of time. this meant that interpreted scripting languages were more accessible in their quick turn-around (edit, run, rather than edit-compile-link-run). this has long since ceased to be a problem - it's usually not even worth doing the traditional separate compilation (incremental .o generation ala make).
- scripting languages are almost universally slower. yes, I said it. there are minor exceptions, such as if you spend all your time in lapack, it doesn't matter whether you call it from C or Python. but try loops: C (Fortran, etc) will let you approach hardware optimal performance, whereas scripting languages, even if JIT/bytecode/etc will tend to run a small factor slower (say, somewhere between .5 and .05 the speed.)
- I suppose it's worth mentioning that scripting was originally shell scripting, and so scripting languages usually have first-class (builtin) features for handling separate processes, output, strings, regexps, etc.
Python is a scripting language to be more precise even though it has many features belonging to programming languages. The barrier between programming languages and scripting languages is becoming sharp!
I don't think it makes sense to make this distinction, or at least the terminology is not very clear.
It makes a bit of sense to distinguish interpreted from compiled languages, although there are of course languages that have both an interpreter and a compiler, and interpreted languages are not necessarily always slower than compiled ones. This boundary is also blurry because of things like bytecode (Java) and WAM code (Prolog).
It makes a lot of sense to distinguish Turing-complete languages from non-Turing-complete languages. You cannot call something a "real" programming language unless it is Turing-complete.
It also makes sense to classify languages based on how low-level or high-level they are: clearly, assembler is lower level than C, and C is lower level than Python.
It's an object oriented scripting language. That means it has all the benefits of object oriented design (objects, inheritance, polymorphism), but code is not compiled. It is during run-time. Convenience!
Python is high level programming language which often used as a scripting language, but of course it has the ability to be used as non-scripting too..
It mimics a scripting language in that it is flexible in implementation, has loose typing and is incredibly portable ,while in actuality uses a JIT compiler or is a compile at runtime language similar in this aspect to java. You may categorize it as you please but I would defer to those people who develope and maintain the language.
It is a scripting language, I would say. I've never heard of a Python compiler making a stand alone executable for any platform.
Python is a semi-interpreted language : that's mean that it is neither purely interpreted as lisp, prolog or javascript nor compiled as C or java. It runs though a byteCode (.pyc files), that makes the excecution faster than purely interpreted matters.
About the initial question, programming or scripting, it's a question of point of view ;
for me : scripting is included in programming.
take care of the planet for our children :)
I have seen some answers saying Python is a scripting language because it is interpreted. I don't agree.
If a language is Turing-complete, it is a programming language. That is all.
But if a language (Turing-complete or not) is "designed" for being used as a "collection or commands" (like Bash), or for automatizing tasks, or any other situation where the key issue is the "sequence" and not the "control logic", it is an scripting language.
So, the classification depends here not on its features, but on its "desirable uses".
Other complete different thing is when a programming language is used as a scripting language, despite of its real purpose. This is the case of Python. Python is a programming language which it is also very comfortable, due to its syntax, to serve as a scripting language. Counterexample: Bash is also a programming language (Turing complete) but it is not a good language to write true applications, for different reasons: slow, computation is made using the standard output, it have not floating points numbers, expression syntax is verbose, and so on. But for calling "commands" and capturing their outputs, Bash works very fine.
I recommend you to ask technical questions to http://stackoverflow.com/
Oh, nonsense. Python is just not a *shell* scripting language, so it's not as neat as bash et al for scripting shell stuff. What makes it a scripting language is the fact that there is no separate, user-visible compilation step. It also happens to be slower than most (separate-compilation-step) programming languages, even though they can do the same things. There's a long history of projects that demonstrate that interpretation (or the appearance of it) is NOT incompatible with performance (for instance, Self.)
"Scripting" is an assertion about ease-of-use that happens to be associated more often with less ambitious (in complexity and performance) applications. Scripting is also anti-associated with features often done by compilers, such as static typing. There is often a pejorative aspect to using the term, but that's just unconstructive.
Every scripting language is a programming language; it's just that scripting describes a subset of language implementations that are best suited to applications where immediacy is paramount. And that there is a clear set of implementations that are suited to projects where complexity and performance are more obviously handled by traditional compilers. It's not even really a language issue - if you REALLY wanted to, you could create a compiler and RTL that would make bash scripts run extremely efficiently. Similarly, you can do an interpreter for C, which doesn't turn C into a scripting (pejorative) language. You can also write quite complicated and possibly efficient stuff in Python or Javascript, but won't get, eg, static/strong typing out of it.
I've not said (I suppose you are answering me), Python is a *shell* scripting language.
Python is a programming language. If I have compared Python with Bash was only to make clear that the distinction between then is rather a matter of "objetives" and not of "features":
-- Python: programming language which can be used as a scripting language, due to its comfortable syntax.
-- Bash: scripting language not suitable for be used as programming language, but fine to make scripts (sequence of commands or instructions substituying repetitive manual tasks).
For this reason I said that Bash is the "counterexample" of Python: it is represent exactly the opposite situation.
And I don't think there is, at least currently, a serious use of the word "scripting" as a way to mean a language "simpler as, or far from, true (compiled) programming languages", or something like that (at least, not in all cases). Bash is not a simple language at all. Concepts as pipelines, redirection, strings treatment or subscripting are conceptually and syntactically very complex, and requires a lot of practice to domain them well, and it doesn't lose its condition of "scripting language" for this reason. It is a scripting language because it is mainly designed to make scripts (and these script can became very complex, specially in the field of "systems administration").
There is only one case where I agree with you: when an interpreative language is used to do "little applications". In this cases, you find the sentence "I've made a little script with Python", when the thing wanted to say is: "I've made a little application with Python". But there are only sentences said by "ignorant" people.
Python is a scripting language as much as Perl is a scripting language. People will often say "Here, run this perl script". By Aaron's definition, that shouldn't be what is said, people *should* say "Here, run this perl program."
There are two distinct paradigms at play here. Many SysAdmins (and others) will refer to a source file if it a) can be written in a simple ASCII based editor; b )doesn't need to be compiled to a binary; and c) can run on multiple different platforms/OSes without being recoded.
Perl and Python fit that above description. As do many others. Is [g]awk a scripting language? I've written complete programs in it, and still refer to it as such. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the Python web site considers Python to be a programming language.
Python is a scripting language which has some programming language features.
Check and download this article "An Analysis of Scripting Languages for Research in Applied Computing" from the link below:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259147772_An_Analysis_of_Scripting_Languages_for_Research_in_Applied_Computing
So the answer is YES
Hope this helps!
Conference Paper An Analysis of Scripting Languages for Research in Applied Computing
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Programming Languages