A nice bit of syntax

[Bob Sneidar]

Interesting too, because Applescript is a kind of offshoot of HyperTalk. It was my impression that Applescript was a way to get the whole operating system and applications to work like Hypercard did. It was a great idea, and is still incredibly useful, but the severe downside to Applescript is trying to decipher what those damned application dictionaries are asking you to do. Most of the time there are absolutely NO examples of syntax.

I have read through the Acrobat one, and I have to tell you I still have no idea how to do most things. I always have to revert to googling some method, and then when I see what they are doing, I can find absolutely no correlation in the Acrobat dictionary. I have similar problems with other dictionaries. I eventually end up using javascript, and having Applescript tell acrobat to run the javascript as javascript. Writing Livecode to tell Applescript to tell Acrobat to tell Javascript to do a series of things is an interesting exercise in multidimensional thinking, but I find it is still much MUCH easier than the trial and error (almost always error) of doing it completely in Applescript.

While Applescript seems on it’s face to be a way of writing programs in a way that is accessible to more common developers like myself, it turns out to be a highly specialized language that needs to be studied and mastered like many other high level languages. “Livetalk” if you will, allows novice programmers to get going almost right away.

Bob S


On Feb 22, 2015, at 09:47 , Mark Schonewille <m.schonewille at economy-x-talk.com<mailto:m.schonewille at economy-x-talk.com>> wrote:

Hi Geoff,

While this looks very nifty, it definitely isn't easier to program. LiveCode is much easier (IMHO). We should never be able to do this with LiveCode, simply because this isn't how xTalk languages function.

One important difference is that AppleScript uses typed variables and even typed data and objects, while in an xTalk language everything is a string (except for arrays perhaps, which are constructs of strings). I consider this an advantage of xTalks.

If you really like this way of programming, you can create Cocoa-AppleScript applications with XCode, which I actually consider a very interesting way of programming, but I'm happy that I can use LiveCode next to AppleScript.

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Best regards,

Mark Schonewille