What is The Difference Between Awk And Q, Programming Languages

Awk is a Scripting Language, while Q is an Interpreted Programming Language

What are Scripting Languages

Scripting languages are programming languages that control an application. Scripts can execute independent of any other application. They are mostly embedded in the application that they control and are used to automate frequently executed tasks like communicating with external programs.

What are Interpreted Programming Languages

An interpreted language is a programming language for which most of its implementations execute instructions directly, without previously compiling a program into machine-language instructions. The interpreter executes the program directly, translating each statement into a sequence of one or more subroutines already compiled into machine code. (Wikipedia)

While Awk is a Scripting Language, and Q is an Interpreted Programming Language

Let us now look at the difference between the two:

What is Awk Programming Language – A brief synopsis

Awk was born in the Bell Labs in the 1970s. It is used for processing text-based data in data streams and files and uses the string datatype, arrays, and regular expressions.

What is Q Programming Language – A brief synopsis

It is called Q for being an equational programming language. It is an interpreted functional language that was designed by Albert Graf at the University of Mainz in Germany. It can be described as a set of equations used to evaluate expressions.