Very high-level programming language

A very high-level programming language (VHLL) is a programming language with a very high level of abstraction, used primarily as a professional programmer productivity tool.

VHLLs are usually domain-specific languages, limited to a very specific application, purpose, or type of task, and they are often scripting languages (especially extension languages), controlling a specific environment. For this reason, very high-level programming languages are often referred to as goal-oriented programming languages.

The term VHLL was used in the 1990s for what are today more often called high-level programming languages (not "very") used for scripting, such as Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Visual Basic.