Re: "a reference to"
Re: "a reference to"
- Subject: Re: "a reference to"
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:34:12 +0000
On 10 Jan 2008, at 23:14, Mark Alldritt wrote:
You could then close the rest of the
loop by making AppleScript actually validate an object reference
against the
dictionary - at least generating an error/warning when things are not
explicit.
Errors would be a bad idea. Warnings might be okay as long as they
were optional.
Early versions of appscript tried to enforce references as you
describe. The problem is that application dictionaries are neither
sufficiently detailed nor accurate for this sort of client-side
enforcement to be done without false positives occurring. After a year
I ended up pulling all the validation stuff out again; it just caused
more hassles than it was worth.
The other thing is that client-side validation isn't really all that
useful in a dynamic language such as AppleScript: any validation it
might do at runtime would be done shortly after by the application
anyway, so is just a duplication of effort.
Compile-time validation may be of some use in [optionally] statically
typed languages such as ObjC; e.g. Scripting Bridge generates glue
headers based on the class structures and hierarchy defined by the
application dictionary. Although again, unless this enforcement is
optional it's going to be counterproductive any time users encounter
an imperfect or insufficiently detailed dictionary. (e.g. SB doesn't
provide a 'compatibility' option; users have to resort to raw AE codes
any time the terminology-based API barfs, which somewhat defeats the
purpose of having a high-level API in the first place.) And even then
it isn't all that big a win, given all the other things that can still
go wrong at runtime.
...
Finally, what novice scripters really need isn't yet more runtime
validation that occurs well down the line when they come to run their
code; it's immediate, interactive assistance and feedback in
constructing well-formed code in the first place. This is why I keep
pointing to newer environments such as Alice and Scratch, because once
you replace 'dumb' character-based source code with an 'intelligent'
structure editor these sorts of facilities are straightforward to
provide.
has
--
http://appscript.sourceforge.net
http://rb-appscript.rubyforge.org
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