This means that some programs have very poorly written dictionaries
and documentation. This reality is not the fault of AppleScript
necessarily. So while one vendor may support the "whose" clause,
another may not. This can cause a lot of confusion, but it's the
nature of the beast. I am thankful that there are so many apps that
support AppleScript even if they don't support it to the nth degree.
It makes things challenging sometimes, but at least these things are
possible. Without AppleScript, they wouldn't be.
IMHO AppleEvents/AppleScript is a seriously over engineered IAC model.
You're correct that dictionary differences add to the complexity of writing
AppleScript code. But the key reason for the variable support and
consistency between applications is that AppleEvents and AppleScript are
very difficult for developers to support in the first place.
Looking through the presentation may give an idea
why complete scripting support isn't more prevalent. In my mind it's
a lack of effort from developers, and a lack of effort from Apple to
make it easier for developers to understand all the things that make
AppleScript better for end users.
I don't blame developers at all. Apple shouldn't have made a complicated IAC
model.
I wish we had a simple IAC model whereby processes could publish public
functions for other processes to use with a small set of simple datatypes
for data exchange (the core BASIC data types plus shared memory blocks
mapped into both processes address space). On both Mac OS and Windows. COM
comes a lot closer to this than AppleEvents, and COM is easier to use from
the client side, but still complicated and difficult to support server side
(unless you're using VB). Far more applications would offer far more IAC
services if it was just *simple* to publish those services.
As for end user scripting, you could pretty much have a FileMaker-like
script editor for such a system. And quite frankly, end users would
understand it better than AppleScript, which is prime example of why
programming languages shouldn't try to mimic english until the day when (if)
computers are smart enough to converse in english.
Daniel L. Taylor
Taylor Design
Computer Consulting & Software Development
help at taylor-design dot com
www.taylor-design.com
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