Shell Programming and Scripting

A computer scientist will correctly explain that all programs are interpreted, and that
the only question is at what level. But if you ask this question of someone who isn't a
computer scientist, they might tell you that a program has been compiled to physical
machine code once, and can then be run multiple times, whereas a script must be
translated by a program each time it's used.

Perl programs 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 at it
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.