Re: "corruption of the AS language"
Re: "corruption of the AS language"
- Subject: Re: "corruption of the AS language"
- From: Matthew Stuckwisch <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 21:20:06 -0600
The simplest example I know of is this:
tell app "Microsoft Entourage"
say subject of message 1 of folder 1
end tell
Just in general, has everyone been CHECKING what commands in
apps/additions will take? I know cricket noted this specifically
because the "say" command looks for TEXT. Not having implemented
AppleScript in any programs myself (since I don't know C/C++/Obj-C), I
can only speculate, but it would seem to me that to add an evaluator to
check to see if the variable is a reference and if so to evaluate it
would slow down programs and make the code base bulkier. This said
from the eyes of a C-variant innocent. But the basic idea still stands.
I don't personally think that it is very hard to make sure to evaluate
stuff and/or sending the write kind of commands. I find it rather
amazing that so many people seem to be attacking the Apple programmers,
when I've yet to have a major problem with the AS language, and I've
been working with AS since OS9, and now have a full program with AS
Studio that has gotten me a scholarship at the Critical Languages
Center at University of Alabama. I've not had problems with any of the
bugs people have mentioned.
That said, I HAVE encountered some bugs. But, and maybe it's just
because I don't verbal attack the developers, the AS engineers have
been very courteous in responding to my problems and in many cases
fixing the problems for the next release. As to things not being
"natural" in syntaxial construction of lines, I'm reminded of a
specific line from 10.1's AS Studio:
set a to button b of VIEW OF tab view item c of tab view d
Many, MANY, people complained about this necessary addition of "view
of" because it didn't make logical sense unless you knew a good deal of
Obj-C Cocoa. Lo and behold, it got fixed and is now optional. Note
that people on the AS Studio list were incredibly polite about the
problem. Another issue I had was accidently coercion on MY PART from
Unicode text-->string which corrupted several writing scripts (eg,
Thai, Arabic, Greek). Turns out based on my own not paying attention
to that ASLG that is still so very applicable to today (I was doing
string & unicode text, which the ASLG specifically states that in this
construction the unicode text will first be coerced to a string).
I don't see the corruption of AS, I only see extensions, and even these
to me seem to be rather logical. Calm down people, both sides.
Matthew Stuckwisch
[AIM/MSN]{GuifaSwimmer} | [Yahoo!]{SapphireTree} | [ICQ]{137477701}
[IRC]{guifa}(esperNET / GamesNet) | [E-mail]{email@hidden}
PS. To the person who mentioned the slightly buggy UI scripting.
Really, write in a bug report, they don't have to be too technical, and
since UI scripting is in beta, Apple really would like bug reports
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