programming-for-dummies

Scripting Languages 75
In comparison, typeless languages don’t care what type of data the program
stores at any given time. This makes writing programs much easier because
your program assumes if it’s going to yank data from a particular program,
such as Microsoft Excel, the data is probably going to be the right “type”
anyway, so type-checking would just be restrictive and tedious.
Scripting languages are typically used in four different ways:
✦ To automate repetitive tasks
✦ To customize the behavior of one or more programs
✦ To transfer data between two or more programs
✦ To create standalone programs
Book I
Chapter 3
Types of
Programming
Languages
Automating a program
At the simplest level, scripting languages (also called macro languages) can
automate repetitive tasks that essentially record your keystrokes so you can
play them back at a later time. For example, if you regularly type the term
Campylobacteriosis (a disease caused by the Campylobacter bacteria), you
have two choices:
✦ Type that phrase manually and hope that you spell it correctly each time.
✦ Type this phrase just once (the easier solution), record your keystrokes,
and use those captured keystrokes to create a scripting language
program that you can save and run in the future.
Figure 3-6 shows a scripting language, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), that’s
captured keystrokes and saved them in a VBA scripting language program.
Figure 3-6:
Recording
keystrokes
automatically
creates
the
equivalent
VBA code in
Microsoft
Word.