Jan 19, 2001, 11:30 AM
Post #1 of 1
(From the Perl FAQ)
Is it a Perl program or a Perl script?
It doesn't matter.
In ``standard terminology'' a program has been compiled to physical machine code once, and can then be be run multiple times, whereas a script must be translated by a program each time it's used. Perl programs, however, are usually neither strictly compiled nor strictly interpreted. They can be compiled to a byte code form (something of a Perl virtual machine) or to completely different languages, like C or assembly language. You can't tell just by looking whether the source is destined for a pure interpreter, a parse-tree interpreter, a byte code interpreter, or a native-code compiler, so it's hard to give a definitive answer here.