Chapter 16. Scripting

The term “scripting language” is vague and may mean different things to different people. Generally such languages are interactive and interpreted rather than compiled and are often embedded within larger applications to provide certain kinds of configuration. At first glance it may seem as if such languages have nothing to do with Java, which is compiled, noninteractive, and almost never embedded in a larger system.

One of the remarkable things about programming languages is that any sufficiently powerful language can be used to implement any other language, and indeed Java itself is largely implemented in C++. This means it is possible to implement a scripting language within Java.

To illustrate this idea and begin to demonstrate ...

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