Once upon a time scripting referred to facilities that were rather limited and typically providing a programmatic interface to another application or operating system. They would mainly be interpreted. What's happened since is it has become acceptable to have general purpose languages which are not compiled so you get things like Ruby or JavaScript which are much like traditional languages like C++ but are also similar to yesterday's scripts in the sense you can just bring up and editor, type a few lines and just run it without further messing about. People use the word 'script' in connection with Ruby but it really has no significance. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.