Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
- Subject: Re: AppleScript and shell scripting
- From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 21:30:45 -0300
At 10:03 PM +0100 7/30/07, has wrote:
>>It's not the language that's deficient. They language is fine,
>>robust.
>
>The language is neither fine nor robust. It lacks even the most basic of functionality that other languages provide as standard - a decent collection of text, list, math and filesystem commands
Absolutely. The lack of something as basic and simple to implement as trig functions contributes to the deficiency. To reiterate something posted earlier, the trig functions are functions hardwired into the fpu of the damned processor, so why in the name of the flying spaghetti monster aren't there trig functions in AppleScript? Sure, I can download the Satimage OSAX, but look at the number of people who post and say things like "the solution can't involve any OSAX or other third party add ons". So they have to go with Deivy's mathlib, which is fine, but shouldn't be necessary. The reason it's necessary is because AppleScript is unequivocally deficient in that department. It could easily have a comprehensive library of math functions. Having written a library of statistical functions in C myself I can't see why this relatively easy addition has never been done. Do people think that AppleScript users don't do math? (because it's application scripting) Well, if the language is to be robust, as Ed maintains, then it should have a better math library (and that's just picking on one element).
Don't get me wrong. I use AppleScript every day. Wrote a script this afternoon that speeds up something I want to do (avoids doing it manually), even though I used the less than stellar text processing abilities AppleScript. And I try to get Mac users to use AppleScript as often as I can. Because application scripting can be very useful. But as Hamish continues to say, it's not always the best solution. When you have processing time to consider, it's frequently not the best solution. Even for some of its application scripting tasks - the thing at which it excels - it's slow. If that speed penalty can be overcome by using something else, I'm going to use the something else.
- web
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