AppleScript Updated to 1.8.3

Warlock7 writes "Apple has made the 1.8.3 version of AppleScript available. You can get the update through Software Update." It's available for both Mac OS and Mac OS X, though, as usual, a detailed list of changes is hard to find, though some are in the accompanying About AppleScript file. It appears they've fixed bugs with coercing Unicode text (now I can fetch and use text from iTunes via Apple events), and Apple says it provides increased stability of scripts, and runs applications created with the latest version of AppleScript Studio.

Comments

Re:Does anyone care?

[ProfKyne]

Howsabout some Stuff That Matters? Jeez... at least timothy posts amusingly trollish crap. pudge... well really, does anyone give a fuck about minor point releases of scripting languages used by the three people worldwide who found Python too difficult to get their heads round?

Actually, AppleScript isn't really easier than Python. Even for non-programmers, I would be willing to bet that most people find Python easier to learn and more intuitive -- AppleScript has an "English-like" syntax (as its marketing says), and English is actually one of the most inconsistent and hardest languages to learn (for those who are not raised speaking it). Why? Because there are so many different ways to say the exact same thing in English, not just synonyms but the grammatical structure itself -- very unsystematic. I find that the same thing is true of AppleScript. This is often leveraged against Perl by those who would criticize it as being difficult to learn (in comparison with PHP or Python, for instance).

Whereas Perl and AppleScript provide "more than one way to do it", Tim Peters praises Python saying There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Anyone who's written an AppleScript can tell you this is definitely not true of AppleScript.

Besides that, AS hooks nicely with scriptable apps on the Mac. It even lets you call shell scripts and other languages' scripts directly. I don't use AS much, but one of my favorite little tools is a script I incorporated into my text editor ( BBEdit ) -- I highlight a function name and hit F8, and my web browser pops open and serves me the man page for that function (using php.net's awesome URL-based function lookup.

No, none of this really matters for non-Mac users, but then why are you reading apple.slashdot.org if you're not interested? Besides, as you can see from the release number, it's not like AppleScript has been updated much in its 14+ years of existence. For Script-savvy Mac users, this is "news that matters".