Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
- Subject: Re: on neophytes vs perfectionists (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
- From: Doug McNutt <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:32:51 -0700
At 08:55 -0800 12/18/08, John C. Welch wrote:
Because if that's what you want, you should use those (other
languages) instead? AppleScript
is AppleScript. Just like English isn't Chinese, Farsi, Portuguese, or
Spanish, AppleScript isn't a lot of other languages. "Not being something
else" is never a definition of "bad".
AppleScript is pretty much the only way to access capabilities of GUI
applications written for Macintosh.
Those "other" scripting languages mostly have a way to get to
AppleScript for the purpose of getting something done that normally
requires human action. If there isn't a specialized interface to
AppleEvents in the language it surely has an escape-to-shell
capability. Once you do that you can use the osascript and osacompile
UNIX tools that will compile an AppleScript on the spot and run it.
Yes, that's a slower way to do things, but scripting languages were
never built for speed and AppleScript by itself will never compete
with a compiled application for speed.
What's hard is creating an AppleEvent and sending it to an
application without the help of AppleScript. There the problem is
extracting the needed command codes from the application. Script
Editor's dictionary processing is pretty much all you get though
there have been some conversions of aevt resources to the likes of
HTML around.
Figuring out just how to phrase the English text will forever remain
a PITA. The best way by far is to ask on this list and someone will
help you. Just have a look at the archives and be careful about
making your problem clear. Wouldn't a man page for AppleScript with a
whole lot of examples be nice?
As for the do Shell Script command, there is a problem. The bash
shell is executed on a one-time basis and doesn't even run your
startup scripts. The shell has no memory of environment variables
save those that are read from $HOME/.MacOSX/environment.plist at
login time. If you tell application "Terminal" to do script *** in
window "yourchoice" you will be able to see the stdout and stderr
data as well as being able to set variables and have them remembered.
--
Applescript syntax is like English spelling:
Roughly, though not thoroughly, thought through.
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