資料來源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

Ousterhout's dichotomy
     
         {John Ousterhout}'s division of {high-level
        languages} into "system programming languages" and "scripting
        languages".  This distinction underlies the design of his
        language {Tcl}.
     
        System programming languages (or "applications languages") are
        {strongly typed}, allow arbitrarily complex {data structures},
        and programs in them are {compiled}, and are meant to operate
        largely independently of other programs.  Prototypical system
        programming languages are {C} and {Modula-2}.
     
        By contrast, scripting languages (or "glue languages") are
        weakly typed or untyped, have little or no provision for
        complex data structures, and programs in them ("{scripts}")
        are {interpreted}.  Scripts need to interact either with other
        programs (often as {glue}) or with a set of functions provided
        by the interpreter, as with the {file system} functions
        provided in a {UNIX shell} and with {Tcl}'s {GUI} functions.
        Prototypical scripting languages are {AppleScript}, {C Shell},
        MSDOS {batch files}, and {Tcl}.
     
        Many believe that this is a highly arbitrary dichotomy, and
        refer to it as "Ousterhout's fallacy" or "Ousterhout's false
        dichotomy".  While strong-versus-weak typing, data structure
        complexity, and independent versus stand-alone might be said
        to be unrelated features, the usual critique of Ousterhout's
        dichotomy is of its distinction of compilation versus
        interpretation, since neither {semantics} nor {syntax} depend
        significantly on whether code is compiled into
        {machine-language}, interpreted, {tokenized}, or
        {byte-compiled} at the start of each run, or any mixture of
        these.  Many languages fall between being interpreted or
        compiled (e.g. {Lisp}, {Forth}, {UCSD Pascal}, {Perl}, and
        {Java}).  This makes compilation versus interpretation a
        dubious parameter in a taxonomy of programming languages.
     
        (2002-05-28)