My University handbook said: "'Scripting' is just another word for 'programming'.".
This is very scary. While the differences between a scripting language and a programming language are quite "blurry", they are in no way synonyms.
That's just... not true. If somebody says it is, I'll just respectfully disagree with their definition of the term. A more suitable distinction would be interpreted (scripting) language vs. compiled language. A scripting language is a programming language, the only practical difference to compiled languages is the number of layers of interpretation of executable code before it's in a format that the CPU understands.
Although wikipedia isn't the definitive source for everything, at least there's some confirmation that I'm not alone with this opinion:
"A scripting language or script language is a programming language that..." (wikipedia)
I apologize; my answer was a bit too forward. While I will not down-right agree that a scripting language is always a programming language, I will say that it is generally agreed upon that the differences between the two are, as I said above, blurry.
For academic purposes, the best comparison would not be scripting vs programming, but, as you said, interpreted vs compiled.
If we were to try to compare scripting vs programming - well, that's an age old debate.
Here's some food for thought though. A programming language is a programming language in large part due to the fact that it communicates back to the machine. A scripting language, though, requires a programming language to translate, i.e. interpret, and communicate for it.
That being said, now-a-days there are many languages - which are legitimate scripting languages - that are around as powerful, and sometimes more powerful, than legitimate programming languages. That's one major contributing factor towards the blurriness of this debate.
