Re: Do shell script and special characters
Re: Do shell script and special characters
- Subject: Re: Do shell script and special characters
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 15:43:47 +0100
Chris Espinosa wrote:
>
Advice welcome.
Mmmm, real Tower of Babel stuff. Okay...
Making general assumptions about data types (as is currently done) seems a
bit risky during this "transitional phase". Some components are starting to
talk in characters while others still talk in bytes and there's a lack of
mechanisms to tell which is which.
Some folks have suggested turning _all_ control over to the user. This may
solve the immediate problem, but might also introduce new ones (as nothing
in this world comes for free):
1. It runs completely counter to "The AppleScript Way" - transferring
control to the user also means dumping them with all the extra work and
responsibility that comes with it. AS's major selling point is its
"friendliness" - take that away, and you're left with little else.
2. It might create rigidity that constricts future development. Just
imagine the furore it'll cause whenever something in the underlying system
changes and breaks all those user-made assumptions. If the system retains
control, it can silently update its assumptions in sync with those changes
without ever disturbing the user.
-------
Anyway, here's one more idea for the pot:
Change the way AS and the shell connect. Concatenating 'smart' data into
'dumb' strings is crude and nasty: in a VHLL like AppleScript, users (as a
rule) really shouldn't have to perform such nonsense themselves. Instead,
make shell commands, stdin/out/err, etc. into first-class objects in
AppleScript.
command "rm" with parameters {-r, -m, alias "somepath"}
You might be able to handle a lot of these ugly type issues internally if
your user interface was just a bit higher-level. Not trivial
implementation-wise, but it doesn't sound like there's a "simple" solution
anyway.
Worth thinking about?
has
--
http://www.barple.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk -- The Little Page of AppleScripts
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