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67-562: The scripting language in AutoIt 1 and 2 was statement-driven and designed primarily for simulating user interaction. From version 3 onward, the AutoIt syntax is similar to that found in the BASIC family of languages. In this form, AutoIt is a general-purpose, third-generation programming language with a classical data model and a variant data type that can store several types of data, including arrays. An AutoIt automation script can be converted into

134-446: A Perl 4 binary with Oracle Call Interface compiled in. This has however since been replaced by a library (Perl Module), DBD::Oracle . Other complex and task-oriented applications may incorporate and expose an embedded programming language to allow their users more control and give them more functionality than can be available through a user interface, no matter how sophisticated. For example, Autodesk Maya 3D authoring tools embed

201-745: A Windows Script Host engine (VBScript, JScript and VBA by default in Windows and third-party engines including implementations of Rexx, Perl, Tcl, Python, XSLT, Ruby, Modern Pascal, Delphi , and C). A majority of applications can access and use operating system components via the object models or its own functions. Other devices like programmable calculators may also have glue languages; the operating systems of PDAs such as Windows CE may have available native or third-party macro tools that glue applications together, in addition to implementations of common glue languages—including Windows NT , DOS , and some Unix shells , Rexx, Modern Pascal, PHP, and Perl. Depending upon

268-693: A de facto standard environment for developers using AutoIt. AutoIt1 and AutoIt2 were closed-source projects, and had a very different syntax than AutoIt3, whose syntax is more like VBScript and BASIC. AutoIt3 was initially free and open-source , licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License , with its initial public release 3.0.100 in February 2004, and had open-source releases in March 2004 and August 2004. Version 3.0.102, released in August 2004,

335-425: A metacompiler itself compiles a domain-specific metalanguage specifically designed for the domain of metaprogramming . Besides parsing domain-specific languages, metacompilers are useful for generating a wide range of software engineering and analysis tools. The meta-compiler methodology is often found in program transformation systems . Metacompilers that played a significant role in both computer science and

402-408: A script is a relatively short and simple set of instructions that typically automate an otherwise manual process. The act of writing a script is called scripting . Scripting language or script language describes a programming language that is used for scripting. Originally, scripting was limited to automating an operating system shell and languages were relatively simple. Today, scripting

469-406: A scripting language , and is often used in a way analogous to a programming library . The boundaries between these concepts are quite blurry, much like the boundary between scripting languages and general-purpose languages. Domain-specific languages are languages (or often, declared syntaxes or grammars) with very specific goals in design and implementation. A domain-specific language can be one of

536-568: A shell to perform more complex programming tasks. The line between domain-specific languages and scripting languages is somewhat blurred, but domain-specific languages often lack low-level functions for filesystem access, interprocess control, and other functions that characterize full-featured programming languages, scripting or otherwise. Many domain-specific languages do not compile to byte-code or executable code, but to various kinds of media objects: GraphViz exports to PostScript , GIF , JPEG , etc., where Csound compiles to audio files, and

603-418: A "common" language, the user gets the advantage of being able to transfer skills from application to application. A more generic alternative is simply to provide a library (often a C library) that a general-purpose language can use to control the application, without modifying the language for the specific domain. JavaScript began as and primarily still is a language for scripting inside web browsers ; however,

670-438: A compressed, stand-alone executable which can be run on computers even if they do not have the AutoIt interpreter installed. A wide range of function libraries (known as UDFs, or "User Defined Functions") are also included as standard or are available from the website to add specialized functionality. AutoIt is also distributed with an IDE based on the free SciTE editor. The compiler and help text are fully integrated and provide

737-459: A computer program, the shell. Calvin Mooers in his TRAC language is generally credited with inventing command substitution , the ability to embed commands in scripts that, when interpreted, insert a character string into the script. Multics calls these active functions . Louis Pouzin wrote an early processor for command scripts called RUNCOM for CTSS around 1964. Stuart Madnick at MIT wrote

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804-1038: A domain-specific language approach to software engineering involves both risks and opportunities. The well-designed domain-specific language manages to find the proper balance between these. Domain-specific languages have important design goals that contrast with those of general-purpose languages: In programming, idioms are methods imposed by programmers to handle common development tasks, e.g.: General purpose programming languages rarely support such idioms, but domain-specific languages can describe them, e.g.: Examples of domain-specific programming languages include HTML , Logo for pencil-like drawing, Verilog and VHDL hardware description languages, MATLAB and GNU Octave for matrix programming, Mathematica , Maple and Maxima for symbolic mathematics , Specification and Description Language for reactive and distributed systems, spreadsheet formulas and macros, SQL for relational database queries, YACC grammars for creating parsers , regular expressions for specifying lexers ,

871-401: A general-purpose language. A scripting language may lack the functionality to write complex applications. Typically, a script starts executing at the first line of code whereas an application typically starts at a special point in the code called the entry point . For example, Java is not script-like since an application starts at the function named main which need not be at the top of

938-399: A high level of abstraction, or as a control language , particularly for job control languages on mainframes. The term scripting language is sometimes used in a wider sense, to refer to dynamic high-level programming languages in general. Some are strictly interpreted languages , while others use a form of compilation. In this context, the term script refers to a small program in such

1005-434: A host language as a library and tend to be limited to the syntax of the host language, though this depends on host language capabilities. There are several usage patterns for domain-specific languages: Many domain-specific languages can be used in more than one way. DSL code embedded in a host language may have special syntax support, such as regexes in sed, AWK, Perl or JavaScript, or may be passed as strings. Adopting

1072-414: A language for decorating models with assertions or QVT , a domain-specific transformation language. However, languages like UML are typically general-purpose modeling languages. To summarize, an analogy might be useful: a Very Little Language is like a knife, which can be used in thousands of different ways, from cutting food to cutting down trees. A domain-specific language is like an electric drill: it

1139-474: A language for writing extensions to the browser itself, and several standard embedded languages for controlling the browser, including JavaScript (a dialect of ECMAScript ) or XUL . Scripting languages can be categorized into several different types, with a considerable degree of overlap among the types. Scripting is often contrasted with system programming , as in Ousterhout's dichotomy or " programming in

1206-470: A language; typically, contained in a single file, and no larger than a few thousand lines of code. The scope of scripting languages ranges from small to large, and from highly domain-specific language to general-purpose programming languages . A language may start as small and highly domain-specific and later develop into a portable and general-purpose language; conversely, a general-purpose language may later develop special domain-specific dialects. Script

1273-480: A macro language built into the editor, e.g., The SemWare Editor (TSE), vi improved (VIM), or using an external implementation, e.g., XEDIT , or both, e.g., KEDIT . Sometimes text editors and edit macros are used under the covers to provide other applications, e.g., FILELIST and RDRLIST in CMS . A major class of scripting languages has grown out of the automation of job control , which relates to starting and controlling

1340-466: A ray-tracing domain-specific language like POV compiles to graphics files. A data definition language like SQL presents an interesting case: it can be deemed a domain-specific language because it is specific to a specific domain (in SQL's case, accessing and managing relational databases), and is often called from another application, but SQL has more keywords and functions than many scripting languages, and

1407-475: A scripting language for IBM's CP/CMS in 1966. He originally called this processor COMMAND, later named EXEC . Multics included an offshoot of CTSS RUNCOM, also called RUNCOM. EXEC was eventually replaced by EXEC 2 and REXX . Languages such as Tcl and Lua were specifically designed as general-purpose scripting languages that could be embedded in any application. Other languages such as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) provided strong integration with

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1474-530: A scripting language, notably the Google Chrome T-rex game. Early mainframe computers (in the 1950s) were non-interactive, instead using batch processing . IBM's Job Control Language (JCL) is the archetype of languages used to control batch processing. The first interactive shells were developed in the 1960s to enable remote operation of the first time-sharing systems, and these used shell scripts , which controlled running computer programs within

1541-556: A set of tags that can be used in ColdFusion pages to interact with data sources, manipulate data, and display output. CFML tag syntax is similar to HTML element syntax. FilterMeister is a programming environment, with a programming language that is based on C, for the specific purpose of creating Photoshop -compatible image processing filter plug-ins; FilterMeister runs as a Photoshop plug-in itself and it can load and execute scripts or compile and export them as independent plug-ins. Although

1608-447: A single application. A number of languages have been designed for the purpose of replacing application-specific scripting languages by being embeddable in application programs. The application programmer (working in C or another systems language) includes "hooks" where the scripting language can control the application. These languages may be technically equivalent to an application-specific extension language but when an application embeds

1675-435: A specific domain. For example, Perl was originally developed as a text-processing and glue language, for the same domain as AWK and shell scripts , but was mostly used as a general-purpose programming language later on. By contrast, PostScript is a Turing-complete language, and in principle can be used for any task, but in practice is narrowly used as a page description language . The design and use of appropriate DSLs

1742-402: A specific general-purpose language (e.g. QuakeC , modeled after C), they have custom features that distinguish them. Emacs Lisp , while a fully formed and capable dialect of Lisp , contains many special features that make it most useful for extending the editing functions of Emacs. An application-specific scripting language can be viewed as a domain-specific programming language specialized to

1809-581: A substantial amount of logic is written in script, it is better characterized as simply another software component, not "glue". Glue languages are especially useful for writing and maintaining: Glue language examples: Macro languages exposed to operating system or application components can serve as glue languages. These include Visual Basic for Applications , WordBasic , LotusScript , CorelScript , Hummingbird Basic, QuickScript, Rexx, SaxBasic , and WinWrap Basic. Other tools like AWK can also be considered glue languages, as can any language implemented by

1876-441: A touch-activated screen. These languages could in principle be used to control any GUI application; but, in practice their use is limited because their use needs support from the application and from the operating system . There are a few exceptions to this limitation. Some GUI scripting languages are based on recognizing graphical objects from their display screen pixels . These GUI scripting languages do not depend on support from

1943-587: A visual diagramming language, such as those created by the Generic Eclipse Modeling System , programmatic abstractions, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework , or textual languages. For instance, the command line utility grep has a regular expression syntax which matches patterns in lines of text. The sed utility defines a syntax for matching and replacing regular expressions. Often, these tiny languages can be used together inside

2010-456: Is a domain-specific language targeted at novice programmers to easily be able to learn programming. While the language serves as a blend of multiple languages including Delphi , C++ , and BASIC . Most of functions in that language after compiling in fact calls runtime functions written in language specific for targeted platform, so their final implementation is not visible to user. The language primarily serves to make it easy for anyone to pick up

2077-453: Is a key part of domain engineering , by using a language suitable to the domain at hand – this may consist of using an existing DSL or GPL, or developing a new DSL. Language-oriented programming considers the creation of special-purpose languages for expressing problems as standard part of the problem-solving process. Creating a domain-specific language (with software to support it), rather than reusing an existing language, can be worthwhile if

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2144-520: Is a language designed to define test cases to check the behavior of software, without specifying how that behavior is implemented. It is meant to be read and used by non-technical users using a natural language syntax and a line-oriented design . The tests defined with Gherkin must then be implemented in a general programming language. Then, the steps in a Gherkin program acts as a syntax for method invocation accessible to non-developers. Other prominent examples of domain-specific languages include: Some of

2211-757: Is a powerful tool with a wide variety of uses, but a specific context, namely, putting holes in things. A General Purpose Language is a complete workbench, with a variety of tools intended for performing a variety of tasks. Domain-specific languages should be used by programmers who, looking at their current workbench, realize they need a better drill and find that a particular domain-specific language provides exactly that. DSLs implemented via an independent interpreter or compiler are known as External Domain Specific Languages . Well known examples include TeX or AWK. A separate category known as Embedded (or Internal) Domain Specific Languages are typically implemented within

2278-443: Is a subjective characterization that generally includes the following attributes. A script is usually not compiled – at least not its usual meaning. Generally, they are interpreted directly from source code or from bytecode or run as native after just-in-time compilation . A script is generally relatively short and simple. As there is no limit on size or complexity, script is subjective. A few lines of code without branching

2345-462: Is an example of this. The toolkit is a suite of utilities including a specification editor to create a requirements specification , a dependency graph browser to display variable dependencies, a consistency checker to catch missing cases in well-formed formulas in the specification, a model checker and a theorem prover to check program properties against the specification, and an invariant generator that automatically constructs invariants based on

2412-423: Is created specifically to solve problems in a particular domain and is not intended to be able to solve problems outside of it (although that may be technically possible). In contrast, general-purpose languages are created to solve problems in many domains. The domain can also be a business area. Some examples of business areas include: A domain-specific language is somewhere between a tiny programming language and

2479-601: Is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains. There are a wide variety of DSLs, ranging from widely used languages for common domains, such as HTML for web pages, down to languages used by only one or a few pieces of software, such as MUSH soft code. DSLs can be further subdivided by the kind of language, and include domain-specific markup languages , domain-specific modeling languages (more generally, specification languages ), and domain-specific programming languages . Special-purpose computer languages have always existed in

2546-443: Is more pervasive and some languages include modern features that allow them to be used for application development as well as scripting. A scripting language can be a general purpose language or a domain-specific language for a particular environment. When embedded in an application, it may be called an extension language . A scripting language is sometimes referred to as very high-level programming language if it operates at

2613-563: Is often thought of as a language in its own right, perhaps because of the prevalence of database manipulation in programming and the amount of mastery required to be an expert in the language. Further blurring this line, many domain-specific languages have exposed APIs, and can be accessed from other programming languages without breaking the flow of execution or calling a separate process, and can thus operate as programming libraries. Some domain-specific languages expand over time to include full-featured programming tools, which further complicates

2680-415: Is probably considered a script. A codebase of multiple files, that performs sophisticated user or hardware interface or complicated algorithms or multiprogramming is probably not considered a script. A script usually automates a task that would otherwise be performed by a person in a more manual way. A language that is primarily intended for scripting generally has limited capabilities compared to

2747-627: Is typically used to produce utility software for Microsoft Windows and to automate routine tasks, such as systems management, monitoring, maintenance, or software installation. It is also used to simulate user interaction, whereby an application is "driven" (via automated form entry, keypresses, mouse clicks, and so on) to do things by an AutoIt script. AutoIt can also be used in low-cost laboratory automation . Applications include instrument synchronization, alarm monitoring and results gathering. Devices such as CNC routers and 3D-printers can also be controlled. Scripting language In computing,

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2814-421: The Generic Eclipse Modeling System for creating diagramming languages, Csound for sound and music synthesis, and the input languages of GraphViz and GrGen , software packages used for graph layout and graph rewriting , Hashicorp Configuration Language used for Terraform and other Hashicorp tools, Puppet also has its own configuration language . The GML scripting language used by GameMaker Studio

2881-466: The Maya Embedded Language , or Blender which uses Python to fill this role. Some other types of applications that need faster feature addition or tweak-and-run cycles (e.g. game engines ) also use an embedded language. During the development, this allows them to prototype features faster and tweak more freely, without the need for the user to have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of

2948-490: The S language), Bugs , Jags , and Stan . These languages provide a syntax for describing a Bayesian model and generate a method for solving it using simulation. Generate object handling and services based on an Interface Description Language for a domain-specific language such as JavaScript for web applications, HTML for documentation, C++ for high-performance code, etc. This is done by cross-language frameworks such as Apache Thrift or Google Protocol Buffers . Gherkin

3015-456: The transclusion (inclusion by reference) of MediaWiki pages into other MediaWiki pages. There has been much interest in domain-specific languages to improve the productivity and quality of software engineering . Domain-specific language could possibly provide a robust set of tools for efficient software engineering. Such tools are beginning to make their way into the development of critical software systems. The Software Cost Reduction Toolkit

3082-479: The FilterMeister language reproduces a significant portion of the C language and function library, it contains only those features which can be used within the context of Photoshop plug-ins and adds a number of specific features only useful in this specific domain. The Template feature of MediaWiki is an embedded domain-specific language whose fundamental purpose is to support the creation of page templates and

3149-1064: The OS version, WSH and the default script engines (VBScript and JScript) are available. Programmable calculators can be programmed in glue languages in three ways. For example, the Texas Instruments TI-92 , by factory default can be programmed with a command script language. Inclusion of the scripting and glue language Lua in the TI-NSpire series of calculators could be seen as a successor to this. The primary on-board high-level programming languages of most graphing calculators (most often Basic variants, sometimes Lisp derivatives, and more uncommonly, C derivatives) in many cases can glue together calculator functions—such as graphs, lists, matrices, etc. Third-party implementations of more comprehensive Basic version that may be closer to variants listed as glue languages in this article are available—and attempts to implement Perl, Rexx, or various operating system shells on

3216-481: The TI and HP graphing calculators are also mentioned. PC-based C cross-compilers for some of the TI and HP machines used with tools that convert between C and Perl, Rexx, AWK, and shell scripts to Perl, Modern Pascal, VBScript to and from Perl make it possible to write a program in a glue language for eventual implementation (as a compiled program) on the calculator. A number of text editors support macros written either using

3283-475: The advent of graphical user interfaces, a specialized kind of scripting language emerged for controlling a computer. These languages interact with the same graphic windows, menus, buttons, and so on, that a human user would. They do this by simulating the actions of a user. These languages are typically used to automate user actions. Such languages are also called " macros " when control is through simulated key presses or mouse clicks, as well as tapping or pressing on

3350-416: The application or to rebuild it after each tweak (which can take a significant amount of time). The scripting languages used for this purpose range from the more common and more famous Lua and Python to lesser-known ones such as AngelScript and Squirrel . Domain-specific language A domain-specific language ( DSL ) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain . This

3417-445: The automation facilities of an underlying system. Embedding of such general-purpose scripting languages instead of developing a new language for each application also had obvious benefits, relieving the application developer of the need to code a language translator from scratch and allowing the user to apply skills learned elsewhere. Some software incorporates several different scripting languages. Modern web browsers typically provide

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3484-509: The behavior of system programs (in this sense, one might think of shells as being descendants of IBM's JCL, or Job Control Language , which was used for exactly this purpose). Many of these languages' interpreters double as command-line interpreters such as the Unix shell or the MS-DOS COMMAND.COM . Others, such as AppleScript offer the use of English-like commands to build scripts. With

3551-422: The code. The following code starts at main , then calls printHelloWorld which prints "Hello World". In contrast, the following Python code prints "Hello World" without the main function or other syntax such as a class definition required by Java. Scripts are often created or modified by the person executing them, but they are also often distributed, such as when large portions of games are written in

3618-534: The computer age, but the term "domain-specific language" has become more popular due to the rise of domain-specific modeling . Simpler DSLs, particularly ones used by a single application, are sometimes informally called mini-languages . The line between general-purpose languages and domain-specific languages is not always sharp, as a language may have specialized features for a particular domain but be applicable more broadly, or conversely may in principle be capable of broad application but in practice used primarily for

3685-487: The computer industry include Meta-II , and its descendant TreeMeta . Unreal and Unreal Tournament unveiled a language called UnrealScript . This allowed for rapid development of modifications compared to the competitor Quake (using the Id Tech 2 engine). The Id Tech engine used standard C code meaning C had to be learned and properly applied, while UnrealScript was optimized for ease of use and efficiency. Similarly,

3752-452: The development of more recent games introduced their own specific languages, one more common example is Lua for scripting. Various business rules engines have been developed for automating policy and business rules used in both government and private industry. ILOG , Oracle Policy Automation , DTRules, Drools and others provide support for DSLs aimed to support various problem domains. DTRules goes so far as to define an interface for

3819-404: The language allows a particular type of problem or solution to be expressed more clearly than an existing language would allow and the type of problem in question reappears sufficiently often. Pragmatically, a DSL may be specialized to a particular problem domain, a particular problem representation technique, a particular solution technique, or other aspects of a domain. A domain-specific language

3886-580: The language and develop a game, and thanks to GM runtime which handles main game loop and keeps implementation of called functions, few lines of code is required for simplest game, instead of thousands. ColdFusion 's associated scripting language is another example of a domain-specific language for data-driven websites. This scripting language is used to weave together languages and services such as Java, .NET, C++, SMS, email, email servers, http, ftp, exchange, directory services, and file systems for use in websites. The ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) includes

3953-432: The large and programming in the small ". In this view, scripting is glue code , connecting software components , and a language specialized for this purpose is a glue language . Pipelines and shell scripting are archetypal examples of glue languages, and Perl was initially developed to fill this same role. Web development can be considered a use of glue languages, interfacing between a database and web server . But if

4020-515: The operating system or application. When the GUI provides the appropriate interfaces, as in the IBM Workplace Shell , a generic scripting language, e.g. OREXX , can be used for writing GUI scripts. Application specific languages can be split in many different categories, i.e. standalone based app languages (executable) or internal application specific languages (postscript, xml, gscript as some of

4087-460: The question of whether a language is domain-specific or not. A good example is the functional language XSLT , specifically designed for transforming one XML graph into another, which has been extended since its inception to allow (particularly in its 2.0 version) for various forms of filesystem interaction, string and date manipulation, and data typing. In model-driven engineering , many examples of domain-specific languages may be found like OCL ,

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4154-485: The requirements. A newer development is language-oriented programming , an integrated software engineering methodology based mainly on creating, optimizing, and using domain-specific languages. Complementing language-oriented programming , as well as all other forms of domain-specific languages, are the class of compiler writing tools called metacompilers . A metacompiler is not only useful for generating parsers and code generators for domain-specific languages, but

4221-559: The standardization of the language as ECMAScript has made it popular as a general-purpose embeddable language. In particular, the Mozilla implementation SpiderMonkey is embedded in several environments such as the Yahoo! Widget Engine . Other applications embedding ECMAScript implementations include the Adobe products Adobe Flash ( ActionScript ) and Adobe Acrobat (for scripting PDF files). Tcl

4288-632: The use of multiple DSLs within a rule set. The purpose of business rules engines is to define a representation of business logic in as human-readable fashion as possible. This allows both subject-matter experts and developers to work with and understand the same representation of the business logic. Most rules engines provide both an approach to simplifying the control structures for business logic (for example, using declarative rules or decision tables ) coupled with alternatives to programming syntax in favor of DSLs. Statistical modelers have developed domain-specific languages such as R (an implementation of

4355-444: The widely distributed scripts, respectively implemented by Adobe, MS and Google) among others include an idiomatic scripting language tailored to the needs of the application user. Likewise, many computer game systems use a custom scripting language to express the programmed actions of non-player characters and the game environment. Languages of this sort are designed for a single application; and, while they may superficially resemble

4422-451: Was created as an extension language but has come to be used more frequently as a general-purpose language in roles similar to Python , Perl , and Ruby . On the other hand, Rexx was originally created as a job control language, but is widely used as an extension language as well as a general-purpose language. Perl is a general-purpose language, but had the Oraperl (1990) dialect, consisting of

4489-474: Was initially open-source, but by January 2005 was distributed as closed-source. Subsequent releases, starting from the February 2005 release of version 3.1.0, were all closed-source. Version 3.1.0 was also the first release with support for GUI scripts. The free and open-source AutoHotkey project derived 29 of its functions from the AutoIt 3.1 source code. The AutoHotkey syntax is quite different from AutoIt3 syntax, and rather resembles AutoIt2 syntax. AutoIt

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