Current Perl documentation can be found at perldoc.perl.org.

Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:

It doesn't matter.

In ``standard terminology'' a program has been compiled to physical machine code once, and can then be be run multiple times, whereas a script must be translated by a program each time it's used. Perl programs, however, 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 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.