ASP in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Name

LANGUAGE — <%@ LANGUAGE= ScriptingEngine %>

Synopsis

Sets the default scripting engine the web server will use to process the script in your ASP. This is set to VBScript by default.

Parameters

ScriptingEngine

A valid scripting engine recognized by Internet Information Server. The valid scripting engines include VBScript, JScript, PerlScript, Python, and REXX.

Example

<%@ LANGUAGE="JScript"%>

' This code sets the language for the current page to
' JScript, Microsoft's interpretation of the JavaScript
' scripting language. All script on this page will be 
' interpreted using the JScript DLL.

Notes

Setting the LANGUAGE directive does not prevent you from using other scripting engines on your script page. It only sets the default scripting engine for interpretation of script on the current page. The following example shows how you can set the default scripting engine for the page to JScript and still use VBScript for a specific procedure:

<%@ LANGUAGE="JScript"%>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript" RUNAT="Server">
Sub ShowReport( )
	' This script will be interpreted using the VBScript 
	' scripting engine. 
End Sub
</SCRIPT>

Furthermore, setting the LANGUAGE directive value has no effect on the scripting engine used on the client side. Even if you set the LANGUAGE of the server-side script to PerlScript,^[1] for example, you can still set the LANGUAGE attribute of the client-side <SCRIPT> tag to JScript, as in the following example:

<%@ LANGUAGE="PerlScript"%> <% ' All server-side script is interpreted ...