Difference between a script and a program

Question

What is the difference between a script and a program  Most of the time I hear that a script is running  is that not a program  I am bit puzzled  can anybody elaborate on this

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According to my perspective  the main difference between script and program   Scripts can be used with the other technologies  Example  PHP scripts  Javascripts  etc  can be used within HTML   Programs are stand-alone chunks of code that can never be embedded into the other technologies   If I am wrong at any place please correct me I will admire your correction

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Scripts are usually interpreted  by another executable    A program is usually a standalone compiled executable in its own right  although it might have library dependencies   consisting of machine code or byte codes  for just-in-time compiled programs

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See   The Difference Between a Program and a Script  A Script is also a program but without an opaque layer hiding the    source code  whereas a program is one having clothes  you can t see it s source code unless it is decompilable   Scripts need other programs to execute them while programs don t need one

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A  program  in general  is a sequence of instructions written so that a computer can perform certain task   A  script  is code written in a scripting language  A scripting language is nothing but a type of programming language in which we can write code to control another software application   In fact  programming languages are of two types    a  Scripting Language  b  Compiled Language  Please read this   Scripting and Compiled Languages

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Typically  a script is a lightweight  quickly constructed  possibly single-use tool   It s usually interpreted  not compiled   Python and bash are examples of languages used to build scripts   A program is constructed in a compiled language  like C or C    and usually runs more quickly than a script for that reason   Larger tools are often written as  programs  rather than scripts - smaller tools are more easily developed as scripts  but scripts can get unwieldy as they get larger   Application and system languages  those used to build programs applications  have tools to make that growth easier to manage   You can usually view a script in a text editor to see what it does   You can t do that with an executable program - the latter s instructions have been compiled into bytecode or machine language that makes it very difficult for humans to understand  without specialized tools   Note the number of  oftens  and  usuallys  above - the terms are nebulous  and cross over sometimes

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script  it contains set of  scripting language  instructions which controls  runs other system programs  applications also it can be scheduled   Program  it contains set of instructions  which performs certain task upon compilation of the program with the compiler

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For me  the main difference is that a script is interpreted  while a program is executed  i e  the source is first compiled  and the result of that compilation is expected     Wikipedia seems to agree with me on this    Script        Scripts  are distinct from the core   code of the application  which is   usually written in a different   language  and are often created or at   least modified by the end-user     Scripts are often interpreted from   source code or bytecode  whereas the   applications they control are   traditionally compiled  to native   machine code    Program       The program has an executable form   that the computer can use directly to   execute the instructions  The same   program in its human-readable source   code form  from which executable    programs are derived  e g   compiled

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There are really two dimensions to the scripting vs program reality    Is the language powerful enough  particularly with string operations  to compete with a macro processor like the posix shell and particularly bash  If it isn t better than bash for running some function there isn t much point in using it  Is the language convenient and quickly started   Java  Scala  JRuby  Closure and Groovy are all powerful languages  but Java requires a lot of boilerplate and the JVM they all require just takes too long to start up    OTOH  Perl  Python  and Ruby all start up quickly and have powerful string handling  and pretty much everything-else-handling  operations  so they tend to occupy the sometimes-disparaged-but-not-easily-encroached-upon  scripting  world  It turns out they do well at running entire traditional programs as well   Left in limbo are languages like Javascript  which aren t used for scripting but potentially could be  Update  since this was written node js was released on multiple platforms  In other news  the question was closed   Oh well

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I take a different view   A  script  is code that acts upon some system in an external or independent manner and can be removed or disabled without disabling the system itself   A  program  is code that constitutes a system  The program s code may be written in a modular manner  with good separation of concerns  but the code is fundamentally internal to  and a dependency of  the system itself   Scripts are often interpreted  but not always  Programs are often compiled  but not always

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IMO Script - is the kind of instruction that program supposed to run Program - is kind of instruction that hardware supposed to run  Though i guess  NET JAVA byte codes are scripts by this definition

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A framework or other similar schema will run interpret a script to do a task   A program is compiled and run by a machine to do a task

[scripting] Difference between a script and a program?

Examples related to scripting