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One popular, reasonable definition for "systems language" is "used for writing programs that don't have a GUI" (other than web-based ones). Another popular, re
by adiabatty 10y ago
One popular, reasonable definition for "systems language" is "used for writing programs that don't have a GUI" (other than web-based ones).
Another popular, reasonable definition for "systems language" is "something one could write an OS in".
- unimpressive 10y agoI think the latter is a more reasonable definition than the former, since I've written plenty of command line applications in python. And as much as I like python, if it qualifies as a 'system language' than just about anything does. Perhaps it could be amended "Primarily used for writing programs without a GUI."
- Jonhoo 10y agoI'm slightly hesitant to agree with both of these. The first seems wrong to me, because Bash qualifies, whereas Tcl doesn't. The second is better, though I think it excludes some interesting languages, like Scala, which you probably wouldn't write an operating system in, but that you could certainly build "systems" in (e.g., Spark).
- samuellb 10y agoI'd call a systems programming language "something which can use the low level ABI of the underlying platform". So C and e.g. FreePascal would fit the description (for most hardware platforms). And Java, for instance, would not unless the platform runs Java bytecode.