Since Windows Vista, yes they are. You are correct that they require the .Net Framework, but the .Net Framework comes built-in with Vista. While Visual Studio's serves as an IDE for VBA, it is not required to write and use VBA script.
Ah, I see. My experience is great with XP -- haven't had much time on a Vista machine, though, so thanks for the info. Of course, in setting up a new XP machine, Visual Studio and .NET are the first and foremost things to get installed. So, I guess,
my out-of-the-box Windows machines do include several ways to "script" (I use the term "script" loosely to mean, basically, "writing code," although some of the code that is written is more "programming applications" than "writing scripts.")
This also should not go towards a comparison of Visual Studios and the built-in scripting environments of a Mac. A Mac does provide a great simple way to write script "out-of-the-box," but it is in no way comparable to the features and capabilites of Visual Studios. The addition of Visual Studios Express Edition with Windows would go a long for Windows. It is not built-in, so all that it would enable you to do does not belong in this discussion...
True, true. For Mac OS X to reach the power of Visual Studio, one would need a better development environment than the commnd-line or AppleScript -- something along the lines of XCode and knowledge of Cocoa/Objective-C.
...but, I do have a question for you regarding that. Would it be better for Windows to include yet another component to their OS so that it is "built-in," or is the fact that you can download the Express Edition for free so that individual users choose what they want better?
I guess this is all personal preference -- in Mac OS X, as I stated, those languages take up very little space... a few hundred megabytes to a maximum of a gigabyte for all of them together. The reason is probably because they're command-line based and have no need to include a GUI, which is a very large portion of the size of an IDE.
Still, it's worth comparing that Visual Studio and the .NET framework are quite large -- Visual Studio being several gigabytes for the complete package (C#, C++, VB, etc.).
Part of the reason that Mac OS X includes these technologies is that they are almost inherent to a UNIX distribution. While not included in all distributions, they are key languages in doing useful things in the command-line. Windows, on the other hand, is a much more GUI-oriented operating system, with a "shell" that is decades old. But now we're getting into backward-compatibility issues...
I dunno. It can be argued one way or another. Mac OS X includes a ton of useful scripting and programming languages out-of-the-box, but require programming knowledge to use. I could say that a newcomer that is not familiar with programming and has little command-line experience couldn't even begin to use Perl or Ruby. This is not so with Visual Basic -- a newcomer with little programming experience or command-line experience can take up Visual Basic in a few days and be "productive" with it to an extent.