RE: Scripting Languages (was Re: Techniques for writing an interp reter)

  Jamie Honan wrote:
> I don't like these aspects
> Type checking is often minimal, often only done at runtime. I suppose
> this feature is so you don't have to do extra typing for declarations


Actually, not all languages, suitable for scripting have weak type
system. Pure functional language Haskell is recently proposed to be
used as a scripting language for Microsoft COMponents. The task of COM
scripting is quite close to general OS scripting.


The details are in the article: Scripting COM components in Haskell
(Simon Peyton Jones, Erik Meijer, and Daan Leijen). it is available
from: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~simonpj/com.ps.gz


Briefly, authors argue that Haskell is suitable for scripting purposes
even better than Visual Basic, usually used for this purpose. Reasons
are - flexible static polymorphic type system, which is able to infer
an appropriate type for variable, so programmer is free from the task
of declaring variable, but guarded from type errors. Also, Haskell
has lazy execution model and higher-order functions. Combined, they
lead to very powerful custom control structures.


Haskell can be either interpreted or compiled, represents a lot of
instructions in line of code, strongly typed, but without extra burden
for programmer, so it is BOTH scripting and system programming
language. It is not very popular, though. But worth looking at:
http://www.haskell.org


Victor Zhukov.
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.