System programming languages (otherwise known as applications languages) are programming languages that are statically typed, allow arbitrarily complex data structures, compiled, and meant to operate largely independently of other programs. Prototypical system programming languages are C and Modula-2. This term derives from John Ousterhout's division of high-level languages into "system programming languages" and "scripting languages". This distinction underlies the design of his language Tcl. A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... On computer science, a datatype (often simply type) is a name or label for a set of values and some operations which can be performed on that set of values. ... A binary tree, a simple type of branching linked data structure. ... A compiled language is a programming language whose implementations are typically compilers (translators which generate machine code from source code), and not interpreters (step-by-step executors of source code, where no translation takes place). ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... Modula-2 is a computer programming language invented by Niklaus Wirth at ETH around 1978, as a successor to Modula, an intermediate language by him. ... John Ousterhout is the original force behind the scripting programming language Tcl and the platform-independent GUI toolkit Tk, which he developed when he was professor at the University of California, Berkeley. ... A high-level programming language is a programming language that is more user-friendly, to some extent platform-independent, and abstract from low-level computer processor operations such as memory accesses. ... Tcl (originally from Tool Command Language, but nonetheless conventionally rendered as Tcl rather than TCL; and pronounced tickle) is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. ...

By contrast, scripting languages (or "glue languages") are dynamically typed or untyped, and programs written in them (known as scripts) are interpreted or sometimes byte-compiled. 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, DOS batch files, and Tcl. This article or section should be merged with script programming language In computer applications, a script, roughly speaking, is a computer program that automates the sort of task that a user might otherwise do interactively at the keyboard. ... Interpretation, or interpreting, is an activity that consists of establishing, either simultaneously or consecutively, oral or gestural communications between two or more speakers who are not speaking (or signing) the same language. ... Bytecode is a binary representation of an executable program designed to be executed by a virtual machine rather than by dedicated hardware. ... It has been suggested that Crash counting be merged into this article or section. ... Screenshot of a sample Bash session, taken on Gentoo Linux. ... GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ... AppleScript is a scripting language devised by Apple, Inc. ... The C shell (csh) is a Unix shell developed by Bill Joy for the BSD Unix system. ... Instructions on how to use the directory command. ...

Many believe that this is a highly arbitrary dichotomy, and refer to it as "Ousterhout's fallacy" or "Ousterhout's false dichotomy" ^{[citation needed]}. While static-versus-dynamic 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 between compiling versus interpreting, 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 mix of these. Many languages may be either interpreted or compiled, depending on dialect and implementation (e.g. Lisp, Forth, UCSD Pascal, and Java). This makes compiling versus interpreting a dubious parameter in a taxonomy of programming languages. A dichotomy is a division into two non-overlapping or mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive parts. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). ... A system of codes directly understandable by a computers CPU is termed this CPUs native or machine language. ... In computer science, lexical analysis is the process of converting a sequence of characters into a sequence of tokens. ... Bytecode is a binary representation of an executable program designed to be executed by a virtual machine rather than by dedicated hardware. ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ... Forth is a programming language and programming environment, initially developed by Charles H. Moore at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the early 1970s. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... Java is a programming language originally developed by Sun Microsystems and released in 1995. ...

The term system programming language is also (and perhaps more widely) used to mean "a language for system programming": that is, a language designed for writing system software as distinct from application software. In contrast with application languages, such system programming languages typically offer more direct access to the physical hardware of the machine: an archetypical system programming language in this sense was BCPL. The distinction between languages for system programming and applications programming became blurred with widespread popularity of C. Systems programming (or system programming) is the activity of programming system software. ... System software is a generic term referring to any computer software that is an essential part of the computer system. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) is a computer programming language that was designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966; it was originally intended for use in writing compilers for other languages. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ...

System Programming Language or SPL is also the name of a specific language on the HP 3000 computer series used for its operating system MPE and other systems software. The HP 3000 series is a family of minicomputers released by Hewlett-Packard in 1973 after a difficult development project. ... MPE stands for: the Multi Protocol Encapsulation Method. ...

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Bold text // “GFDL” redirects here. ...