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The Art of Unix Programming
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Unix Programming - Applying Minilanguages - Case Study: JavaScript

Case Study: JavaScript

JavaScript is an open-source language designed to be embedded in C programs. Though it is also embedded in web servers, its original and best-known manifestation is client-side JavaScript, which allows you to embed executable code in Web pages to be run by any JavaScript-capable browser. That is the version we will survey here.

JavaScript is a fully Turing-complete interpreted language with integers, real numbers, booleans, strings, and lightweight dictionary-based objects resembling those of Python. Values are typed, but variables can hold any type; conversions between types are automatic in many contexts. Syntactically JavaScript resembles Java with some influence from Perl, and features Perl-like regular expressions.

Despite all these features, client-side JavaScript is not quite a general-purpose language. Its capabilities are severely restricted to prevent attacks on the browser user through Web pages containing JavaScript code. It can accept input from the user and generate or modify Web pages, but it cannot directly alter the contents of disk files and cannot open its own network connections.

Over time, the JavaScript language has become more general and less bound to its client-side environment. This is something that can be expected to happen to any successful specialized language as its possibilities unfold in the minds of developers and users. Client JavaScript now interacts with its environment by reading and writing values in a single special object called the browser DOM (Document Object Model). The language still has some legacy APIs to the browser that don't go through the DOM, but these are deprecated, not present in the ECMA-262 standard for JavaScript, and may not be supported in future versions.

The standard reference for JavaScript is JavaScript: The Definitive Guide [FlanaganJavaScript]. Source code is downloadable.[94] JavaScript makes an interesting study for two reasons. First, it's about as close to being a general-purpose language as one can get without actually being there. Second, the binding between client-side JavaScript and its browser environment via a single DOM object is well designed, and could serve as a model for other embedding situations.



[81] The POSIX standard for regular expressions introduces some symbolic ranges like [[:lower;;]] and [[:digit:]], and some specific tools have extra wildcards not covered here, but these will suffice to interpret most regexps.

[82] For non-Unix programmers, an X toolkit is a graphics library that supplies GUI widgets (like labels, buttons, and pull-down menus) to the programs that link to it. Under most other graphical operating systems, the OS supplies one toolkit that everyone uses. Unix and X support multiple toolkits; this is part of the separation of policy from mechanism that we called out as a design goal of X in Chapter1. GTK and Qt are the two most popular open-source X toolkits.

[83] Whether or not “macro expansion” should be spelled “macroexpansion” is a matter for some dispute. The latter is found mainly among Lisp programmers.

[84] It is not clear that XSLT could be any simpler and still do its job, however, so we cannot characterize it as a bad design.

[87] It is also quite traditional for Unix books that describe pic(1) to include their own illustrations as coding examples.

[88] The line is owed to Alan Perlis, who did some of the pioneering work in software modularity around 1970. The semicolon in question was the statement separator or terminator in various Algol-descended languages, including Pascal and C.

[89] For those who have never programmed in a modern scripting language, a dictionary is a lookup table of key-to-value associations, often implemented through a hash table. C programmers spend a lot of their coding time implementing dictionaries in various elaborate ways.

[90] I was at one time an awk wizard, but I had to be reminded by someone else that the language was applicable to the HTML-generation problem where this book's only awk example occurs.

[93] One of the silliest things you can do with a modern Unix machine is run the Eliza mode of Emacs against random quotes from Zippy the Pinhead. M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead; type control-G when you've had enough.

[94] Open-source JavaScript implementations in C and Java are available.


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The Art of Unix Programming
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