Re: Dates gone wild
Re: Dates gone wild
- Subject: Re: Dates gone wild
- From: Jon Pugh <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 08:19:00 -0700
At 5:46 AM -0600 9/9/03, Doug McNutt wrote:
>
We have been down this turnpike before and I remain frustrated. If someone would use precise terms to define "reference" instead of saying fuzzy things like "It's much higher level than a pointer." Or "It's all text." perhaps we could get it straight.
AppleScript references are much more complicated than that because they fall into several categories.
The first is the application's object specifiers. These are how AppleScript talks to applications. These are not text, they are a potentially complex nested data structure of properties, containment and test descriptions which allow complicated whose clauses to be expressed.
The second most common form of reference is an internal AppleScript reference. This is something that AppleScript uses and is never seen by applications, only by scripters. We're dealing with one of these in this example. AppleScript is passing around a pointer to a date object, which is 64 bits and won't fit into a register so it's a pain to pass around. We just have trouble seeing the reference since it's generally treated like an actual date object automatically. In fact, I suspect we'd have a hard time determining that it *really* is a reference.
This data sharing was a constant source of annoyance while developing AppleScript. Warren Harris used to come to the weekly meeting grumbling about the differences, or lack thereof, between set and copy, and switching back and forth over which was more commonly desired. The real problem was, you need both to do any real list processing, and it ended up pretty annoying to do both.
Is that precise enough for you?
Jon
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