Coming Soon: AppleScript X!
A post to the applescript-users list by Simon Topliss quotes from the acknowledgements in Ethan Wilde's new book, Adobe Illustrator Scripting:
[quote]I can't wait to get my hands on AppleScript X, a fully-object-oriented and re-engineered version of the AppleScript language - coming soon to a Mac near you.<hr></blockquote>
Between this and AppleScript Studio, AS might get very interesting very quickly. Especially if Apple gets better about making their pro apps scriptable. *cough*
Speaking of AS Studio, I think OSAXen will be on their way out, and the Cocoa-based way of extending AS that Studio provides will be preferred.
:cool:
[ 09-25-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
[quote]I can't wait to get my hands on AppleScript X, a fully-object-oriented and re-engineered version of the AppleScript language - coming soon to a Mac near you.<hr></blockquote>
Between this and AppleScript Studio, AS might get very interesting very quickly. Especially if Apple gets better about making their pro apps scriptable. *cough*
Speaking of AS Studio, I think OSAXen will be on their way out, and the Cocoa-based way of extending AS that Studio provides will be preferred.
:cool:
[ 09-25-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
Comments
Languages like Applescript being Object Oriented goes over the heads of us non programmers. Can you sum up the potential benefits in laymans terms for us "simple folk" and use a lil of that Amorph Magic
Traditionally programming has been all about functions. You write a function (or a procedure, or a method... they're all the same thing) that takes some data, performs some calculations, and returns some data. Very simple.
Except, that in an effort to manage the huge numbers of functions that arose, programmers started breaking them up into chunks, usually as separate files. That way all the math functions were in one file, all the string manipulation functions were in another, and you knew where to find which function easily.
This seemed like a good idea at the time, but as the years progressed, some clever programmers realized that there were two problems with this:
1) It was a *pain* to track down all the places that data went. The most useful analyses often involved trying to trace what happened to the data, and what the results were.
2) It's not how we think about the world.
Imagine you see a car going down the road, and it's doing 25mph. Do you think: "25mph is the speed of that car" or "That car is doing 25mph"
The former is a data-centric view, the latter an object-centric view.
So these clever programmer chaps decided that it would be useful to bind together data that was related, *and* the functions that operated on that data, into one unit called an object.
Now you can have objects that have attributes, such as speed, instead of raw data floating about that you have to try and mentally piece together into a conceptual whole.
This solves both problems:
1) You have the data and the functions (usually called methods in OO systems) that operate on that data all in one place for easy access.
2) It more closely parallels how most people interpret the world.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but it's the basic idea.
Maybe it should be changed to A++ or A#
hah
AppleScript has actually been fairly OO throughout its life, but it sounds like they're taking it to the next level.