What programming languages are 'general purpose' and 'domain specific?

What programming languages are 'general purpose' and 'domain specific'?

• I've read a few posts on SO about different DSL's and GP languages but I'm still a bit confused as to how you define a programming language to be one or the other. My understanding so far (and hopefully you can clarify) is as follows: Languages such as PHP, HTML, CSS are domain specific because they were designed for a singular purpose (e.g. they were designed for building websites - or in CSS' case was for styling websites). Whereas a language such as Ruby or Python is a general purpose language because it can be used for multiple purposes (e.g. Ruby can be used to build websites, as a command line tool, building Mac applications etc). Would that be correct? And if so where does a language like JavaScript fit in which I believe was designed to be domain specific (e.g. it was designed to be used for adding interactivity to websites) but JavaScript can be run on the server or command line, it can be used to interact with software like Photoshop and even doing Windows Shell Scripting so could that be considered a general purpose language because it's used for multiple purposes OR is it still domain specific because it's origins were that it was designed for web? Any clarification appreciated.

• Answer:

  Domain-specific languages are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language. Examples of domain-specific languages include HTML, Logo for children, Verilog and VHDL hardware description languages, Mata for matrix programming, Mathematica and Maxima for symbolic mathematics, spreadsheet formulas and macros, SQL for relational database queries, YACC grammars for creating parsers, regular expressions for specifying lexers, the Generic Eclipse Modeling System for creating diagramming languages, Csound for sound and music synthesis, and the input languages of GraphViz and GrGen, software packages used for graph layout and graph rewriting.