Interpreter
The bulk of what makes up the S-Lang library is its interpreter, and it is also where most of the development takes place. Although the original syntax supported by the interpreter resembled postscript, the syntax has evolved to be much more C-like, with additional support for object-oriented style constructs. As a reflection of Davis's background in Physics and professional interest in Scientific Computing, the language natively supports many vectorized array-based operations familiar to Matlab and IDL users.
Up until the release of version 2.0, Davis had always advocated that the interpreter be embedded into applications to make them extensible. That is, using the interpreter meant either writing a C program that embedded it, or using it in the context of another application (e.g., the JED editor). In this sense, a standalone program called the S-Lang interpreter did not exist. Version 2.0 was released in 2005 with an interactive version of the S-Lang shell, slsh, which until then was distributed as a demo program that was capable of little more than running non-interactive scripts. Since then slsh has evolved into an application in its own right, and has had a number of external modules developed for use by it. As such, it has become the S-Lang interpreter.
Read more about this topic: S-Lang (programming Library)
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“For man is but the servant and interpreter of nature: what he does and what he knows is only what he has observed of nature’s order in fact or in thought; beyond this he knows nothing and can do nothing.”
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“Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”
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“The best interpreter of the law is custom.”
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