Re: How to repeat forever
Re: How to repeat forever
- Subject: Re: How to repeat forever
- From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 14:39:47 -0800
On Dec 16, 2003, at 8:35 AM, VRic wrote:
I think he wasn't talking about dialects (the AS term for stupidly
localizing AS keywords while of course keeping English-like syntax,
which was awkward at best), but rather about OSA languages.
Dialects were definitely awkward in practice, but not for that reason.
A dialect could (and did) have its own parser, so the syntax could be
redefined however the implementor liked. In the Japanese dialect, for
instance, verbs came at the end, as is normal for Japanese. (Only the
French and Japanese AppleScript dialects ever shipped. In fact, as far
as I can tell, they were the only ones ever written. A "programmer's
dialect", presumably resembling C, was discussed, but never
implemented.)
The problem was twofold: first, just as standard AppleScript isn't
necessarily grammatically correct English (this is more glaring some
times than others), the French and Japanese dialects, even at their
best, weren't correct French or Japanese either. Second, and more
seriously, the system required application developers to supply French
and Japanese versions of their dictionaries. Almost no one ever did
this -- it was hard enough getting them to supply a decent English one
-- so you tended to wind up with scripts with only the
AppleScript-defined terms in French or Japanese, which was even more
disruptive than straight English.
The machinery to support dialects was quite complicated, and clearly
wasn't adding anything, so support was officially dropped in
AppleScript 1.4.
Apple didn't give up on [OSA languages] (or did they in OS X?) What's
sad is that so few 3rd parties took advantage of it. Maybe Apple or
the AS team should have released more friendly tech docs and help
about OSA to make the Mac appealing to languages developers. This
would benefit everybody: language developers would love to be guided
thru OSA to give their language access to OS features while still
focusing their work on languages themselves, and Apple would gain
credibility from the availability of many niche languages.
The OSA infrastructure is still perfectly well supported in Mac OS X.
It's true that not many OSA languages exist, but that's not a
particularly serious problem under Mac OS X. The thing a lot of people
don't understand about being an OSA language is that it doesn't really
buy you very much. OK, you can now run scripts written in Your
Favorite Language from applets, or script menus, or whatever, but that
doesn't necessarily mean that those scripts have *any* access to the
OS, much less application scriptability. Use of Apple events and OSA
support are completely orthogonal; having one does not imply anything
about the other.
As for support of "niche" languages, Mac OS X's BSD nature has done
more for that than OSA ever did, since porting a language as a
command-line tool is fairly trivial if there's already a Unix
implementation, which there usually is. Panther, for example, comes
with Perl, Python, Tcl, and Ruby (and probably a few others I don't
even know about), to say nothing of the various freely available
languages.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
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