I feel the Larry's opinion could matter, so here's from
the perlfaq (interesting reading...) :
Is it a Perl program or a Perl script?
Larry doesn't really care. He says (half in jest) that "a script is what you give the actors. A program is what you give the audience."
Originally, a script was a canned sequence of normally interactive commands, that is, a chat script. Something
like a UUCP or PPP chat script or an expect script fits
the bill nicely, as do configuration scripts run by a
program at its start up, such .cshrc or .ircrc, for
example. Chat scripts were just drivers for existing
programs, not stand-alone programs in their own right.
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.
Now that "script" and "scripting" are terms that have been
seized by unscrupulous or unknowing marketeers for their
own nefarious purposes, they have begun to take on strange
and often pejorative meanings, like "non serious" or "not
real programming". Consequently, some Perl programmers
prefer to avoid them altogether.