A high-level programming language that is interpreted (translated on the fly) rather than compiled ahead of time. A scripting language may be a general-purpose programming language or it may be limited to specific functions used to augment the running of an application or system program. For example, JavaScript is widely used on Web pages for calculations as well as for displaying messages, drop-down menus and other user interface elements. Perl, Tcl and Python are very comprehensive interpreted programming languages that are often called scripting languages.
Application Scripts
Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is another example. A subset of Visual Basic, VBA is used to automate Microsoft Office applications. Many applications have their own limited-purpose scripting languages; for example, spreadsheets have macro languages, and communications programs (widely used for dial-up before the Web) and FTP programs generally support scripts for automating functions.
Command Line Scripts
Operating system commands executed from the Windows, Mac (Unix) or Linux command line are limited-purpose scripting languages, more often referred to as "command languages" (see
command processor and
shell script). See
JavaScript,
Perl,
Tcl/Tk,
Python,
VBA,
batch file abc's and
Windows Script Host.