Forms Processing

[Jeremy Fowler]

> The people who put the American Heritage Dictionary together 
> wouldn't know a 
> programming language if it sat on their faces. HTML is an 
> artificial language, 
> but it's not a programming language, it's a markup language 
> for constructing 
> documents.
> 
> I've never heard any literate computer programmer call it a 
> programming 
> language. It lacks too many constructs essential to 
> programming languages 
> (i.e. looping, variables, conditional expressions, etc.).

Granted, the editors at the American Heritage Dictionary are not technical by any means. However, 
they are not medical or industrial either; but they do include widely accepted definitions of words 
that are. They had to get the definition from somewhere, they just didn't make it up. Unfortunately 
they haven't provided a source. The bibliographic record contains "Words are included in this 
Dictionary on the basis of their usage.", meaning they came up with the definition based on it's 
use in the American language. 

However, I can agree with your interpretation that since HTML is a markup language, it is not a 
true programming language. Then you would also have to agree that since perl, python, and PHP are 
scripting languages and thus interpreted languages, they are not true programming languages either. 
For another way to interpret "An artificial language used to write instructions that can be 
translated into machine language and then executed by a computer." is that the language itself has 
to be translated or complied into machine language which is then executed by a computer. So in 
essence, only those languages that are compiled (assembler, C, C++, java, etc) and then stored in a 
machine language form are considered true programming languages. So if one were to include 
scripting languages as a form of programming language, one must also include markup languages. 
Theirs a reason they call them Web Programmers you know... ;-)