Nathaniel Hall wrote:
The confusion between "what is scripting" and "what is programming"
rises from the different levels in the set of activities called "programming".
My personal thought is that programs are compiled prior to the user executing it. A script is compiled at the time it is run. Is that a good way to differentiate them?
Back when I was using CP/M-86 I had both Microsoft's basic interpreter and Microsoft's basic compiler.
Even earlier, there were various PL/1 compilers and interpreters available.
How could a source file be a program to one, a script to the other?
Look more to what these programs do: if they principally run a sequence of *x commands I'd classify them as scripts (in the *x environment).
Even then, if I took this: #!/bin/bash rsync --times --perms --recursive --timeout=3600 $@
and coded it into equivalent C using the system() function, I'd be hard pressed to explain why the C program isn't a script:-)
--
Cheers John
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