This is a difficult question (and I think you're right in a technical sense in your implication that there isn't a true difference). Colloquially, I think of "s

This is a difficult question (and I think you're right in a technical sense in your implication that there isn't a true difference). Colloquially, I think of "scripts" as programs distributed as ASCII or UTF-mumble (or other widely-used string formats) source code that have to be evaluated by different programs installed on your computer, e.g. most JS, Ruby, Python programs. It's a murky distinction, because it's very common to preprocess programs before distribution to the extent that the original code is hardly discernable; for example, using Uglify or transpiling ES2017 to ES3. And you can package programs in both Python and Node such that they actually don't depend on your system having a Node or Python interpreter installed. And I doubt people would refer to C programs as scripts, even if they're distributed in a BSD ports- or Gentoo-style packaging system that defaults to distributing source code rather than precompiled binaries. But I think a decent rule of thumb is that if you can run the original source code file(s) directly by adding the right shebang to the top, it's a script.