The difference between a program and a script isn't as subtle as most people think. A script is interpreted, and a program is compiled.
Of course, there's no reason you can't write a compiler that immediately executes the compiled form of a program without writing compilation artifacts to disk, but that's an implementation detail, and precision in technical matters is important.
Though Perl 5, for example, doesn't write out the artifacts of compilation to disk and Java and .Net do, Perl 5 is clearly an interpreter even though it evaluates the compiled form of code in the same way that the JVM and the CLR do. Why? Because it's a scripting language.
Okay, that's a facetious explanation.
The difference between a program and a script is if there's native compilation available in at least one widely-used implementation. Thus Java before the prevalence of even the HotSpot JVM and its JIT was a scripting language and now it's a programming language, except that you can write a C interpreter that doesn't have a JIT and C programs become scripts.
| Author | chromatic |
| Work | "Program vs. Script" |