On Jan 29, 2008, at 1:00 PM, Michelle Steiner wrote: This script takes four seconds to complete:
tell application "Finder" set foo to entire contents of (path to documents folder) end tell
This script runs almost instantaneously:
tell application "Finder" set foo to entire contents of (path to documents folder) as alias list end tell
Essentially, because the first one returns a more complicated result. Finder spends about the same amount of time on both, but the first returns a list of object specifiers, all of which will be at least five levels deep, each of which has to be decoded separately, whereas the second one returns a list of aliases, which are atomic objects. If you're doing that in Script Editor, there's the additional expense of displaying the result -- it can slow way down when you throw a lot of styled text at it.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
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