Re: Hash arrays [was: does property exists in a record]
Re: Hash arrays [was: does property exists in a record]
- Subject: Re: Hash arrays [was: does property exists in a record]
- From: "Stockly, Ed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:27:23 -0700
>
AA>> I've been feeling thwarted a lot lately. But language bugs are mainly responsible for that not just a lack of a few features.
>
>TB>>Seriously, what bugs in AppleScript? They never hit me in my work.
There are bugs and then there are bugs.
What few bugs there are in AppleScript are fairly easy to identify and work around and, thankfully, not the source of serious problems.
The term "language bugs" I believe is an unfair characterization. The AppleScript language was designed different (differently) than most other programming and scripting languages and some see these differences as "language bugs."
There are also a number of bugs in the AppleScript implementation of a number of apps (including the Finder, and other Apple software) that can be very frustrating.
>
>TB>>Also, what else would people like to be able to do that they cannot do now
(apart from building user interfaces)?
Printing without user prompts would be nice ; )
>
>>From what I can see, the clamor for them (associative arrays) here seems to be limited to a relatively small number of players. Maybe the rest are just silently nodding, but I suspect not.
Well, I guess I'm nodding. But not because I want to write some highly complex scripting algorithms.
>
>>Maybe if I had them, I'd think they were the greatest thing.
I can think of a number of examples that would apply in real world scripting that are pretty simple and straight forward and would make the scripting learning curve much easier, particularly manipulating records on-the-fly, like getting a list of customized features in a Quark page setup for printer X.
>
>>>But I do know that every item that gets priority does so at something else's expense. From that perspective, I'd like to see some argument for why they'd improve the life of the average scripter.
My feeling is that if lists and records acted like proper AppleScript objects and could be addressed by whose clauses and could be easily manipulated (deleting items, sorting by various keys) and, in the case of records, if labels could easily be coerced to and from text strings, then they would be far more useful to the average scripter. If that is a benefit of changing them to associative arrays then I think it's important and I'm all for it. If not, then I'll stop nodding.
ES