On 03/06/2017 09:46 AM, Parrot Raiser wrote:
This is an "angels dancing on the head of a pin" sort of question.
"Program" is about purpose, "script" is about form.
Any set of instructions (even a single one), given to a computer , can
be considered a program. (If you don't believe me, see what Brian
Kernighan and awk did with '$3 > 6'). That's the broad category.
Executable programs may be compiled or assembled binaries. Back when
computers were glacially slow by today's standards, that was the only
practical form for a non-trivial program, (With the possible exception
of Lisp, but that was rare in high-volume applications.) When they are
executed from source code by an interpreter, the source file is a
script. (Which is true of a huge part of Unix and Linux.)
Given the different contexts, (educational, starting with BASIC, small
administrative or ad-hoc for shell, awk, &c.) vs volume processing, a
certain snobbery arose about scripts not being as "serious" as
compiled code. "It's only a scripting language" was a way of
denigrating a language against the speaker's favourite (and likely
first) language.
Considering the enormous amount of processing being done now in
Javascript, Perl, Java, (both of which are intermediates, given that
the script is parsed once into pseudo-code for a VM), and shell, the
distinction is effectively meaningless, except as a description of the
execution process.
Thank you!
I tend to say script when referring to bash code. but,
that is a program too.
-T
--
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Computers are like air conditioners.
They malfunction when you open windows
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