Re: Difference between "as alias" and "as file specification"?
Re: Difference between "as alias" and "as file specification"?
- Subject: Re: Difference between "as alias" and "as file specification"?
- From: Chris Page <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 18:07:32 -0800
nigh on 2001-12-12 4:38 PM, Paul Berkowitz at email@hidden wrote:
>
On 12/12/01 3:13 PM, "Chris Page" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
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> So, generally you want to use aliases. File specifications can be faster to
>
> resolve, but you really only want to use them for short durations.
>
>
I believe that 'file specification' is being "discouraged", if not quite
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deprecated, in OS 10.1 and onwards (AS 1.6). It's more like a legacy term
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now, and is broken in some places (which is why it is discouraged). The real
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coding for 'file' now is something called fileURL, and the term 'file' in
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pure AppleScript is now coerced under the hood to this fileURL. This was in
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the release notes for AS 1.7, and I may be slightly off-mark here but it's
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more or less as I recall.
That's true, although that doesn't change the picture much for AppleScript
writers. My point about the importance of using aliases is still salient.
URLs can be passed between processes, but they still describe an item with a
particular name in a particular location on a particular volume at a
particular point in time. And URLs don't allow for moving the item around or
renaming one of its parent folders like file specifications do. So URLs
should still be confined to short-term use, like passing a message to
another process, but not keeping track of a file during the lifetime of an
application process, or storing in a file for later use.
--
Chris Page
Mac OS Lead, Palm Desktop
Palm, Inc.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that
one9s work is terribly important. - Bertrand Russell