Re: Re. third-party dependencies [was Re: Stock Quotes using AppleScript]
Re: Re. third-party dependencies [was Re: Stock Quotes using AppleScript]
- Subject: Re: Re. third-party dependencies [was Re: Stock Quotes using AppleScript]
- From: Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:03:48 +1100
- Thread-topic: Re. third-party dependencies [was Re: Stock Quotes using AppleScript]
On 16/3/09 1:17 AM, "John C. Welch" <email@hidden> wrote:
> On the other hand, a lot of that kind of thing is provided by various
> applications, and AppleScript was always meant as more of a glue language
> than one that stands on its own...
But if you want to do something as basic as sort a list of stuff, you often
can't hand it off to an application. And the idea of having to launch an
app, create a document in it, set its contents to a string, tell it to
change case, get the contents of the document, and close the document --
just to do a case-conversion -- is beyond not funny and into the realm of
hysterical.
It's not a matter of supplying every obscure possibility or trying to keep
up with the Joneses, just a matter of making the language more usable.
As it happens, I've been doing some stuff in InDesign lately, including some
in javascript. One of the things that struck me again is just how clear and
readable a compound whose clause is can be in AppleScript. You can look at
old code and see in an instant what was happening, without having to dig
through multiple loops of iteration. But then I looked at sections of code
doing string manipulation with TIDs rather than basic commands like split
and so on, and was struck by exactly the reverse.
--
Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
AppleScript Pro Sessions <http://scriptingmatters.com/aspro>
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