Re: Can someone explain this?
Re: Can someone explain this?
I can't comment on excluding/including the "the," except to say
that, any language that depends on an English article being used or
not used to determine the interpretation is lacking in clarity of
language design. Moreover, if the "the" MUST be used in some places,
MUST NOT be used in other places, and is OPTIONAL in still other
places, well--that's a recipe for disaster, in my book. Ideally, the
"the" should be optional everywhere, even if removing it everywhere
makes the program read like it's been written in some kind of
broken, Pidgin English. Broken English or not, it should still do
what it's supposed to do, and what the programmer expected it to do.
The "the' behavior in this thread has been in place for some time and
has only recently been noticed, there are effective workarounds. But,
it is a bug and should be fixed.
This bug is a compiler bug, where the behavior that a corrects a badly
formed reference to the "last item" or "end of" so it can be used as
part of a range, is broken when the word "the" is added.
end of mylist
and
last item of mylist
are both commands that in any other context return the value of the
last item of a list. The compiler is clever enough to realize that in
this context
items 1 thru last item of mylist
and
items 1 thru the end of mylist
the scripter intended to refer to the index of the last item rather
than the value. The "the" simply confuses the compiler so it reverts
to the standard behavior. Very simply and plainly it's a small bug in
the compiler that should be easy to fix.
The easiest solution would be for applescript to not fix the error but
instead generate a compile error. The better solution is to fix this
rather obscure bug.
But don't confuse this bug with cases where "the" is required. Those
cases are not in the basic language. One example is in a finder
command (the clipboard) another case is in Jon's commands "the ticks"
and there are a few cases sprinkled though a number of applications
and osax where a command or a parameter uses the word "the" and in
those cases it is required.
AppleScript is a dynamic language and applications and osax add
terminology to the language and those terms may contain "the".
But, those have nothing to do with this bug. They are coincidental.
ES
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