Comment by Jason Knight on "I am still looking for difference between scripting language and programming language!"

Whilst the answers so far have some interesting information, they're NOT pointing out the distinction I'm familiar with on the term.

See, scripting languages use SOURCE distribution. Not all interpreters do. UCSD Pascal, most ROM BASIC's and so forth are interpreted, BUT they are NOT scripting languages because their distribution model is the intermediate bytecode, NOT the raw source. Whilst ROM BASIC tricks users into THINKING it's source distribution -- it is not. When you enter a line of code it is turned into bytecode, when you "list' the program it is reverse engineered back into legible code.

PHP, JavaScript, shell scripts, and so forth when you deploy your code what you are deploying is the raw flat-text source code.

That's the distinction as I've understood it.

So if it gets converted to bytecode or some kind of intermediate code, then it is programming language, else it is scripting ? I hope I got it right...

Aakash Mallik Not just "converted to bytecode" -- most older ROM basics do that. The question is whether or not the program is DISTRIBUTED as human legible text as opposed to bytecode. If your program is DEPLOYED as a human-legible script -- aka what languages like PHP, JavaScript, Perl, and so forth do -- THEN it's a scripting language.

Meanwhile open up a old BASICA or GW-BASIC .bas file in a flat text editor and you don't get the source code, do you? It can be turned back INTO the source code (that's what BASIC's "LIST" function does, and there's an option to save as ascii) but you're not actually distributing as source.

Though they're ALL "programming languages" -- that's a false premise in the question. The distinction for a scripting language is one of comparison to interpreted, of which scripting is a subset.

But be it scripting, interpreted, compiled, or even assembler, those are ALL programming languages. JUST because it's a "script" doesn't make it not be a programming language!

In that way I think I misread the question in my initial post, since looking at it again now the question is gibberish nonsense. Scripting IS programming, but programming isn't always scripting. Dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs.

So it's not really a programming language property then. Programs from one language could easily be distributed via both methods. (In the same sense that compiled/interpreted isn't strictly a language property).

M - CORRECT! There's no reason you couldn't make a C interpreter (hell that's damned near what PHP and JavaScript are) or a compiler for JavaScript.

Hell, that's where "Just in time" compilation has really started to blur the lines. Hence the whole "virtual machine" bullshit assigned to Java that was more marketing asshattery than fact, since it's JUST a P-Code interpreter with JIT compilation and a really big system library.

Meaning Java is about as bleeding edge in methodology as a really good UCSD Pascal implementation.

Take BASIC which spent the first two decades of its life as a interpreted language, but eventually it started getting compilers.

So yeah, it's not so much a thing specifically tied to the programming language itself any more than compiled or interpreted is. Spot on assessment!

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