It claims to be a scripting language but you still have to compile the programs. Boo! Add CINT (https://root.cern.ch/root/html534/guides/users-guide/CINT.ht...) and you can have instantaneous execution and even a REPL!
I saw a blog post a long time ago that went into the details of how ./foo worked, and how it executed an elf file. You could register `.c` programs in the same way to be compiled and run?
[0] https://gist.github.com/jdarpinian/1952a58b823222627cc1a8b83...
(For even more insanity I guess you could also trigger on // and /*, although there’s some risk of false positives then!)
If you want to insist that scripting languages can be either compiled or interpreted, then its better to just drop it altogether and just say "language" because the "scripting" part has utterly lost its identity at that point.
There are good reasons for why scripts are often interpreted and why systems are often compiled, but that's not what defines them. There are definitely scripts that are compiled and systems that are interpreted out in the wild.
compiled languages are rarely used for one offs because the effort they require is usually greater than the task calls for.
a big part of perl/python use is in tying together libraries written in more difficult lower level compiled languages.
you'll also see scripting used to refer to languages embedded in larger projects. lua scripts to control entities in a game, for instance. do they compile these somehow? I never did in the little project I used lua for.
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all of that together, I expect that scripting as a concept largely boils down to conceptually simpler languages with less view of the ugly underbelly of how things actually work in a computer, used to chain together abstractions created by lower level code.
scripting is duct-tape. whether you duct-tape together a one-off task or some wad of long running functionality is besides the point.
Yes, but this is conceptually exactly the same as the aforementioned shell scenario. This is not something different.
Just as I suspected, there is only one definition, and one that has proven to actually be well defined to boot as you managed to reiterate the only definition I have ever known to perfection.