Re: Is there really *nothing* like AS on Windows??
Re: Is there really *nothing* like AS on Windows??
- Subject: Re: Is there really *nothing* like AS on Windows??
- From: Helmut Fuchs <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 13:23:54 +0200
At 11:37 Uhr +0100 26.09.2001, Charles Arthur wrote:
While I'd like to believe that AS is unique, I just can't believe that
nobody at MSoft didn't think that a scripting language wouldn't be a good
idea. After all, even DOS has a form of it, in BAT files - batch command
files. Where would the world be without the joys of editing AUTOEXEC.BAT
(and trying to remember whether the one you just saved is called
AUTOEXEC.BAK or AUTOEXEC.OLD)?
Well, there's quite a difference between "scripting" and "scripting
applications".
AppleScript as a language is unique only in its incompleteness. But
what makes it stand out as a bright and efficient solution, is the
AppleEvent object model behind it, which enables to plug INTO
Applications that support this object model.
That means that Applications can SHARE the same scripting frontend
for their scripting tasks (actually I should have emphasized "can",
as many applications don't care - yet? - for the AppleEvent object
model and the concepts behind it).
And that also means that AppleScript scripts can actually communicate
with a RUNNING application - which is the basis for interactively
modifying documents. And this is insanely great.
On Windows this kind of standardization is only beginning to form
(see the ongoing .NET-efforts, of which I don't really know if they
are going as far as to define a common vocabulary for common tasks,
like AppleScript does for text prodessing a.s.o). And as far as I
know the Windows-Programming crowd, they can't adhere to standards at
all (actually I fear that most of them even don't understand the
concept of a standard) - so Windows Application Scripting will be a
(bad) dream for quite a while. AFAIK inter-application scripting
under Windows is only possible within the MS suite of products. Or am
I wrong?
So I still think AppleScript/AppleEvent is unique.
Helmut