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Is it a Perl program or a Perl script?

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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.


Source: Perl FAQ: General Questions About Perl
Copyright: Copyright (c) 1997 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington.
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