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F 0018-9162/98/$10.00 © 1998 IEEE March 1998 23 Scripting: HigherLevel Programming for the 21st Century or the past 15 years, a fundamental change has been occurring in the way people write computer programs. The change is a transition from system programming languages such as C or C++ to scripting languages such as Perl or Tcl. Although many people are participating in the change, few realize that the change is occurring and even fewer know why it is happening. This article explains why scripting languages will handle many of the programming tasks in the next century better than system programming languages. Scripting languages are designed for different tasks than are system programming languages, and this leads to fundamental differences in the languages. System programming languages were designed for building data structures and algorithms from scratch, starting from the most primitive computer elements such as words of memory. In contrast, scripting languages are designed for glui...