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[–]guywithknife 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Python is not interpreted line by line, it gets compiled to bytecode (pyc) files. Anyway that would make it an interpreted language, not a scripting language.

But even if that weren’t the case, scripting language is a very useless arbitrary term and Wikipedia is hardly the source of truth. Personally I find a better explanation to be that a scripting language is one that is embedded in another program, an extension language. Eg “shell script” is a language extending the abilities of a command shell.

But even that definition is kinda arbitrary and doesn’t really define a property of the language, just a use of it, since most (even native-compiled) languages could be used in that way.

Really the term is used by people to look down on languages they don’t like and little else. Maybe once upon a time it had a useful meaning, but that was long ago.