On 10 Jun 2014, at 1:16 pm, pscott <email@hidden> wrote:
> What we have here is a failure (of mine) to communicate.
It's not you. Your confusion over the 'containment' and
'inheritance' views of SE's dictionary viewer are understandable,
and you're right in that their labeling is misleading, but honestly,
focusing on that is missing the forest for just a couple tiny trees.
SE's busted dictionary viewer is merely one small symptom of a very
large, 20-year problem: almost *nobody* inside or outside Apple
correctly understands (and/or explains) how any of this stuff
*actually* works.[1]
My advice? If you want a quiet life, just turn a blind eye. By the
time you start noticing these little inconsistencies, your entire
foundational knowledge of AppleScript and application scripting is
already fundamentally busted. But once you start tugging on that
thread, it's only a matter of time until everything you thought you
knew completely unravels - and then you'll *really* hurt
yourself.[2] It's a cop-out, I know, but even flawed and incomplete
knowledge is nevertheless "good enough" for the sorts of work 99% of
AppleScript users do - and about 3000 hours cheaper too. :p
If anyone's really interested, I can expound on this in lots more
detail, but it's a bit of an essay to write (it'll definitely need
an editor:p) and I'm a tad unwell so it won't be this week. For now,
I'll just offer the following paper from Dr William Cook,
AppleScript's original designer:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf
It primarily discusses AppleScript's early development, so probably
doesn't give sufficient theory, implementation, and demonstration
for a full epiphany. But it may provide some useful pointers and its
an interesting bit of history in itself.
HTH
has
[1] Or, to give a hint: Apple event IPC and the Apple Event Object
Model has *absolutely nothing* to do with classes, objects,
containment, inheritance, references or other Object Oriented
concepts and features. Or, to borrow from Theodosius Dobzhansky:
"Nothing in AppleScript Makes Sense Except in the Light of
Relational Queries".
[2] Seriously, don't tug that thread! Way back in 2002, I went into
my first AppleScript book believing I understood everything about
AppleScript, but the harder I tried to put it into words, the more
my explanations completely confused and fell apart. By the time I'd
done a third, I could no longer understand AppleScript at all, and
the whole project completely crashed and burned, leaving one pissed
publisher and me on the street. (And folks wonder why I'm so damn
tetchy at it all the time...:)
|