Where does script collide?

A stored knowledge structure for a stereotyped sequence of events in a familiar situation, such as the well known restaurant script that runs from entering to ordering to eating to paying: it lets a person fill in the expected actions and their order without being told. Schank and Abelson's 1977 Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding proposed the script as a specialised kind of schema, one keyed to a routine of actions over time, and showed how it lets people understand and predict everyday episodes. The referent here is a mental structure inside a person's memory, inferred from recall and reading behaviour, not a text file of commands, a written play, or an alphabet of characters.[1]

Unit

One stored event routine, a slotted sequence for a familiar situation

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Inferred from recall and recognition errors, filled-in gaps, and reading times as people understand short stories about routine events

A short program written in an interpreted scripting language that automates a task or glues existing components together, such as a shell script or a Python script, rather than being compiled ahead of time into machine code. Ousterhout's 1998 Scripting: higher level programming for the 21st Century drew the contrast between scripting languages, made for gluing and quick assembly, and system programming languages built for speed and large structures. The referent is a runnable piece of software, judged by whether it executes and what it does, and it has nothing in common with a routine held in human memory, a written play, or a set of written characters.[2]

Unit

One executable text file of commands, run by an interpreter rather than compiled

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by whether it runs correctly, and by lines of code, execution time, and the tasks it automates

A system of written characters used to record language, such as the Latin, Cyrillic, or Devanagari script: one script can serve many languages, and it is defined by its inventory of signs and the type of unit each sign stands for. Coulmas's 1999 The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems catalogued the world's scripts and classified them as alphabets, abjads, syllabaries, and other types by how their signs map to speech. The referent is a shared inventory of graphic signs, described by its characters and their sound values, and it is not a routine in memory, a runnable program, or the written text of a single play.[3]

Unit

One inventory of written characters, shared across the languages that adopt it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Catalogued by its inventory of signs, the type of unit each sign encodes, and the languages that use it