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Recently I've starting a project I'm calling 'JIL' or JIL Interfacing Language, and it's to be a programming language of sorts. Now, I doubt it will ever be super-useful or versatile, but the aim of it is to be a step up from block programming, but a step down from complex languages like java, C, or C++. JIL stands for JIL Interfacing Language because it is both interpreted and parsed in java, and all of its keywords/methods will be interpreted and then executed in java. My question is would JIL count as a 'true' programming language, or is it a 'false' or 'secondary' programming language that is nothing more than a java application.
using wiki's definition as a rule of the thumb:
A programming language is a formal constructed language designed to
communicate instructions to a machine
yours is formal because it can be parsed. if it also instructs machine what to do then congratulations - your first programming language :)
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Very simple, terse and easy GUI programming “frameworks” [closed]
(10 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
There is GTK in C/C++ and QT in C++. But, I don't want to use C/C++; is there a way to write GUI's in Linux using scripting languages? If so which scripting language and which bindings?
Note: I've intentially not mentioned a preferred scripting language because I don't want responses geared towards one language. Any scripting language will do.
Python has tkinter, which is pretty straightforward. There's also PyGTK and wxWidgets, which are more powerful but less pythonic.
If you don't want to learn the internals of these toolkits, you can always just use them to render a WebView and HTML/CSS your way out of the problem. Your GUI won't have a native feel, though.
The traditional way is using TK. TK started as part of TCL, but there are bindings for most of the popular scripting languages (Perl, Ruby, Python and, of course, TCL, to mention a few). TK is so prevalent that it's hard to think of anything else, really, in that domain. It's very well designed, and the concepts it popularized have wound their way into most GUI toolkits.
If you're comfortable with Java, you may want to check out Scala, as well (Scala can be used as a scripting language).
I am searching for two (one?) languages. One of them would be a host, capable running some "environment", and second, which could used to script "agents" acting in this environment.
Some details:
host should be capable to run multiple "agents" (threads of embedded language), ideally capable to limit number of instructions executed by every thread at a time (though more sophisticated ways of control are welcome)
embedded threads should have access only to objects explicitly exposed by host
embedded threads should be isolated. No shared memory, all communication going via host
embedded language should be rather simple, with dynamic typing
hosting language should be rather high-level
performance is not a primary concern
I was thinking of Python being a host embedding Lua, for example Lunatic Python, or some pair of JVM languages (Scala / Groovy ?), but i'am not sure of possibilities of real isolation of embedded threads (see 2, 3). So I am searching for any ideas, frameworks, successfull implementations etc...
I think the conditions that you have listed aren't very restrictive, you are going to find a large list of pairs of host/thread scripting languages that fall within your six requirements.
So my most important recommendation is that you choose the languages that the intended users will like the most.
There are a couple of ways to approach this. If you decide to start picking a host language, then I think you have the following options:
C/C++: If your intention is to have more freedom of choice for the thread language, then having a C or C++ host will give you the most options, since most interpreted scripting languages are written in C/C++ and have easy mechanisms for embedding into C/C++ applications. Choices for thread languages could be Lua, Javascript, Python, Ruby, PHP, Basic, Scheme, Pascal, Lisp, and many many more.
Java: With Java as a host language you have a short number of scripting languages that are embed friendly. Here is a list.
.NET: I would only go with this if you intend to run on Windows and nothing else, if not I would avoid it. Like Java, you'll find a list of interpreters that can be embedded in a .NET application.
Something else: If you don't like C/C++ or Java as a host language, then you'll have to decide what kind of host language you like, but no matter the choice, you will have a very limited set of options for an embedded language. You suggested Python as a possible host language, which I think is a decent choice. I would advise against using Lua over Python though, that could be a debugging nightmare should you ever need to debug at the language VM level. Instead, I can offer two suggestions: (1) also use Python for the thread language, then you have a nice uniform language across the entire system; (2) find a scripting language that has a native interpreter written in Python (there aren't many that I know of). Instead of Python, you can go with Ruby, PHP, or any other major scripting language for the host, but in all cases you'll have not many options for the embedded language.
Now, instead of looking for a host language, you could pick the embedded language first, then find a host language that can embed that language. You suggested Lua as an embedded language, which is also a very good option. If you are set on using Lua, then I think C or C++ should be your host language, as that will give you the best embedding experience.
To summarize, I recommend one of two following approaches to choosing your pair of languages:
(a) pick a pair of languages where the embedded language interpreter is implemented in the host language. Examples: Lua and C++, Javascript and C++, Python and C++, Scheme and C++, Jython and Java, JRuby and Java, Rhino and Java, etc.
or
(b) pick the same high level scripting language for host and threads, and work on an unified platform without embedded scripting. Examples: Python and Python, Lua and Lua, Ruby and Ruby, etc.
Good luck with your search!
You could also use Common Lisp in particular thru its SBCL implementation.
Using javascript/v8 as the embedded language, and c++ as the host language might be a good solution. See this for how to embed.
V8 provides Contexts, each of which has its own Security Context. These allow you to create multiple separate threads for different clients, each of which is in their own sandbox.
Another alternative is java/javascript(rhino) which also allows embedding. Limiting access to other objects will be harder in java (you have to use a security manager), but you can limit the time a script is allowed to take, see an example in the javadocs here.
I know this question is a couple of years old now, but I'd recommend ObjectScript language.
ObjectScript, OS for short, is a new programming language. It's free, cross-platform, lightweight, embeddable and open-source. It combines the benefits of multiple languages, including: JavaScript, Lua, Ruby, Python and PHP. OS features the syntax of Javascripts, the "multiple results" feature from lua, syntactic shugar from Ruby as well as magic methods from PHP and Ruby - and even more!
A good example here is SnapScript it can be run on any Java compatible environment. In addition to the standard JRE it can also be run on Android (Dalvik and ART) without any modifications.
The IDE actually manages an agent pool for hot execution.
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Closed 12 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
When is a language considered a scripting language?
I am really confused between different types of languages.
Can any one guide what are diff types of languages or diff categories.
Like some saying python is scripting langauge. Now what does that mean. Are other langueages like php , asp , java not scripting langauges
The name "Scripting language" applies to a very specific role: the language which you write commands to send to an existing software application. (like a traditional tv or movie "script")
For example, once upon a time, HTML web pages were boring. They were always static. Then one day, Netscape thought, "Hey, what if we let the browser read and act on little commands in the page?" And like that, Javascript was formed.
A simple javascript command is the alert() command, which instructs/commands the browser (a software app) that is reading the webpage to display an alert.
Now, does alert() related, in any way, to the C++ or whatever code language that the browser actually uses to display the alert? Of course not. Someone who writes "alert()" on an .html page has no understanding of how the browser actually displays the alert. He's just writing a command that the browser will interpret.
Let's see the simple javascript code
<script>
var x = 4
alert(x)
</script>
These are instructs that are sent to the browser, for the browser to interpret in itself. The programming language that the browser goes through to actually set a variable to 4, and put that in an alert...it is completely unrelated to javascript.
We call that last series of commands a "script" (which is why it is enclosed in <script> tags). Just by the definition of "script", in the traditional sense: A series of instructions and commands sent to the actors. Everyone knows that a screenplay (a movie script), for example, is a script.
The screenplay (script) is not the actors, or the camera, or the special effects. The screenplay just tells them what to do.
Now, what is a scripting language, exactly?
There are a lot of programming languages that are like different tools in a toolbox; some languages were designed specifically to be used as scripts.
Javasript is an obvious example; there are very few applications of Javascript that do not fall within the realm of scripting.
ActionScript (the language for Flash animations) and its derivatives are scripting languages, in that they simply issue commands to the Flash player/interpreter. Sure, there are abstractions such as Object-Oriented programming, but all that is simply a means to the end: send commands to the flash player.
Python and Ruby are commonly also used as scripting languages. For example, I once worked for a company that used Ruby to script commands to send to a browser that were along the lines of, "go to this site, click this link..." to do some basic automated testing. I was not a "Software Developer" by any means, at that job. I just wrote scripts that sent commands to the computer to send commands to the browser.
Because of their nature, scripting languages are rarely 'compiled' -- that is, translated into machine code, and read directly by the computer.
Even GUI applications created from Python and Ruby are scripts sent to an API written in C++ or C. It tells the C app what to do.
There is a line of vagueness, of course. Why can't you say that Machine Language/C are scripting languages, because they are scripts that the computer uses to interface with the basic motherboard/graphics cards/chips?
There are some lines we can draw to clarify:
When you can write a scripting language and run it without "compiling", it's more of a direct-script sort of thing. For example, you don't need to do anything with a screenplay in order to tell the actors what to do with it. It's already there, used, as-is. For this reason, we will exclude compiled languages from being called scripting languages, even though they can be used for scripting purposes in some occasions.
Scripting language implies commands sent to a complex software application; that's the whole reason we write scripts in the first place -- so you don't need to know the complexities of how the software works to send commands to it. So, scripting languages tend to be languages that send (relatively) simple commands to complex software applications...in this case, machine language and assembly code don't cut it.
A scripting language is typically interpreted instead of compiled.
See scripting-and-programming,
whats-the-difference-between-a-script-and-an-application
and many similar discussions.
There are many taxonomies for classifying programming languages.
In regard to scripting, a scripting language (python, ruby, php) is a language that runs on an interpretor directly from source code.
Other languages are either compiled languages (run from binary form: c, c++, pascal) either intermediate, compiled to an intermediary form and run inside a virtual machine (java, c#).
A scripting language is a language that focuses on making it easy to chain together or manipulate other programs
Wikipedia says:
"When a language is used to give commands to a software application (such as a shell) it is called a scripting language"
"A scripting language, script language or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more software applications."
This is orthogonal from whether it is interpreted or otherwise - Java was originally interpreted, for example, but nobody called it a scripting language. It just happens that, if you're implementing a scripting language, interpreting it is a straightforward approach to take.
Many scripting languages are compiled, either to bytecode or to machine code, often with JIT.
The distinction between script languages and other languages is mostly between interpreted, dynamically typed languages (for example PHP, VBScript, JScript and Javascript), and compiled, statically typed languages (for example C#, VB.NET, Java, C++ and Delphi).
ASP is not a language, but a platform for scripting languages (VBScript / JScript), while ASP.NET is a platform for compiled languages (mainly C# / VB.NET).
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Closed 11 years ago.
I read something about Lua today, and I was wondering what it was.
I did a Google and Wikipedia search, I understood it until they began talking about C and API. I still don't understand it.
What is Lua and are there any tutorials for beginners?
Lua is a lightweight interpreted programming language developed in Brazil with a focus on embedding.
It is written in Pure ANSI C which means high portability, even as C++ code.
Here is an example:
print("Hello World!")
Wikipedia Summary
Official Site
I'm surprised everyone is getting this one wrong.
Lua is the Hawaiian word for "toilet".
Lua is a scripting language for C and C++. It allows to use the simpler syntax of Lua and execute these scripts in your C/C++ application. Therefore you don't have to compile the program on each change, but simply deliver a new script version.
For tutorials just use google, you'll find enough to keep you busy the next days.
Lua is a simple lightweight highly portable dynamically typed embeddable and extendable multi-paradigm scripting language. The "vanilla" (some would say official) implementation of it is made purely on ANSI C and has an awesome (simple yet powerful) C API that you can use to both embed Lua on your app or extend the behavior of the language itself. It is developed at the Informatics Department of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).
Thought it was not primarily designed for that, Lua found a big niche in game scripting, with big names such as "Grim Fandango" and "World of Warcraft". Nonetheless, because of its speed, simplicity and portability, it is also heavily used in embedded systems (see, for example, eLua project) and graphic computing.
Its philosophy is to be minimalistic, i.e its core libraries are very small with only minimum functionality (quite like C's standard libraries), though through the C API it is very simple to add features that wouldn't be possible through the pure core library, such as sockets, GUIs etc. In fact, Lua is so minimalistic that its main -and only- structured data type are 'tables', that could be described as associative arrays on 'roids.
Lua is procedural in its essence, but also supports multiple paradigms such as functional programming and object orientation.
Though Lua is not the fastest scripting language around (probably javascript's V8 project wins the prize) it is very fast (faster than vanilla Python or Ruby, for instance) and also features a non-official just-in-time implementation called LuaJIT.
In the end, Lua is actually no more than a fun language to play with, which I recommend!.
=)
About tutorials, I'd recommend the article about that on the lua-users wiki.
I hope I helped! =)
PS: I couldn't post all the links because I'm new on stack overflow, but it shouldn't be hard to find everything on Google. Sorry. =(
Lua is a scripting language. Link is to lua.org. It is heavily used in game development, most notably (to me) World of Warcraft.
Lua is a lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It's garnered a lot of popularity partly due to it's use in many popular games. A good example of this is World of Warcraft which uses an embedded version of lua to drive the behavior of the UI elements in the game.
A good intro to the language can be found here: http://computer-programming-languages.suite101.com/article.cfm/a_brief_introduction_to_lua_scripting
And the official online reference for the language can be found here: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/
It's a scripting language that is designed to work with C (and C++). It is designed to be embedded into C/C++ programs. Which means unlike a lot of other scripting languages, it makes no use of global variables and such, this means you can easily thread lua scripting engines.
It also makes claims about being the fastest dynamic scripting language.
I've made use of it in PC based C++ application for creating a plugin scripting interface, and also used it as a embedded scripting language. Its quite versitile, nice and small.
as a general purpose scripting language? Its not quite in the same league as your ruby/python/perl type stuff. It doesn't have as many libraries and the user community is pretty small.
But for extending C++/C apps? its awesome.
The C API, which looks to be the part that confused you, is designed to make it very easy for you to take existing C code (or new C code) and control it with a Lua script. This is what is meant by embedding. Via embedding, you can get a lightweight, programmable, interactive, text-based interface to any C code, for very little effort. Even if you don't embed things yourself, Lua is a very nice little scripting language.
My favorite example is that a nice person put a great many POSIX system calls into Lua. When I want something that is like a shell script but is more sophisticated, I can just use this library. Likewise with the MD5 library and with many others.
When learning Lua you can ignore the C API completely—just benefit from other people's work with the API—and if you ever need to embed your own code, you can come back to it later.
Lua is a SCRIPTING language written in C and is commonly used in game development because of its power and flexibility. Lua is also cross-platform so it can be used anywhere on any platform. Lua can also be used as a programming language with a handy program I use called AutoPlay Media Studio which allows you to create fully fledged applications for the Windows platform. I hope this clears things up for you.
Website: http://www.lua.org.
AutoPlay Media Studio: http://www.indigorose.com.
Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.
Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.
for more you can read here