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Not op but I think one difference between scripts and programs is some level of formal verification, as opposed to simple interpretation.
by ecshafer 8y ago
Not op but I think one difference between scripts and programs is some level of formal verification, as opposed to simple interpretation.
- alangpierce 8y agoIn this sense, JavaScript has advanced far beyond a "scripting language". TypeScript and Flow both allow plenty of formal verification with a type system that's quite a bit more expressive than many popular compiled languages have. It is indeed distributed as JS source code, but "simple interpretation" is an unfair description of what modern JS engines do. The JS is compiled to machine code, then introspected at runtime to look for optimization opportunities based on the real-world way that each function is used.