Re: AppleScript Commands With No Dictionary Entry
Re: AppleScript Commands With No Dictionary Entry
- Subject: Re: AppleScript Commands With No Dictionary Entry
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:36:41 -0800
- Thread-topic: AppleScript Commands With No Dictionary Entry
On 11/12/07 10:18 PM, "Paul Scott" <email@hidden> wrote:
> On Nov 12, 2007, at 9:24 PM, Richard Rönnbäck wrote:
>> You should also download and install Smile. It has the ability to
>> get the
>> Dictionary for AppleScript itself
>
> Now that sounds eminently useful.
>
> I'm still perplexed why the full intrinsic command set of AppleScript
> isn't
> documented by Apple. It's exceedingly frustrating.
However, none of these suggestions will help you too much. When I was
learning AppleScript, I came to exactly the same place with 'activate', and
felt the same way.
It turns out that 'activate' was not originally defined as part of the
AppleScript language itself, and that's why it's not in the (old)
AppleScript Language Guide. If you can get hold of the (very very old)
Scripting Additions Guide (long out of use since much has changed since
then), dating from a time before Apple's scripting additions were combined
into the Standard Additions you'll find 'activate' fully documented as one
of four "extra" commands - activate, log, start log, stop log - referred to
this way:
" Unlike most other scripting additions, the Activate command is built into
the AppleScript extension. It does not have a separate file in the Scripting
Additions folder"
As I said, this guide dates from 1997, before Standard Additions (OS 8.1. if
I remember correctly, or maybe OS 8.5). In those days of OS 7, Apple's
Scripting Additions were all separate files in the Scripting Additions
subfolder. I believe I was told once that 'activate' was the first scripting
addition, dating from OS 7.1 or so, just after AppleScript was created.
Since it was "added", it wasn't considered by the Apple engineers to be part
of the language itself. When Standard Additions were compiled (with a number
of new commands brought over from non-Apple sources, and many more have been
added since), activate, log, etc. were not included since they were "built
into" AppleScript by that point, but still not officially "part of the
language". They were never documented in the Language Guide (dating from OS
7.6), and when Scripting Additions Guide was deprecated soon after, there
was nowhere to find them defined at all.
Move on to modern times. At some point back in OS 8, Smile made the
AppleScript Suite discoverable, and Script Debugger followed soon after. In
Tiger, 'activate' is right there in the AppleScript Suite as seen in both
those apps, and perhaps always was.
There is a new AppleScript Language Guide due out very soon, for AppleScript
2.0 in Leopard. I would hope and expect that 'activate', 'log' and the other
two are now considered to be part of the language (since they _are_ built
in) and no longer "additions", and are therefore defined in the new Guide.
We shall see very soon.
--
Paul Berkowitz
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