AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

The “English-likeness” Monster

As we have already seen, AppleScript is English-like. Its vocabulary appears to be made up of English imperative verbs, nouns, prepositional phrases, and even an occasional relative clause.

Whether this English-likeness is a good thing or not is debatable. It is probably responsible for attracting users who would otherwise be frightened by the rigid-looking pseudo-mathematical terseness of a language like Perl, with its funny variable names, its braces and brackets and semicolons. Personally, though, I’m not fond of AppleScript’s English-likeness. For one thing, I feel it is misleading. It gives one the sense that one just knows AppleScript because one knows English; but that is not so. It also gives one the sense that AppleScript is highly flexible and accepting of commands expressed just however one cares to phrase them; and that is really not so. This sense is reinforced by AppleScript’s abundance of synonyms. For example, instead of saying:

if x <= y

you can say:

if x is less than or equal to y

You are also allowed to use the word “the” wherever it feels natural. And nouns even come with plurals:

get the first word of "hello there"
get the words of "hello there"

Nevertheless, none of this is due to AppleScript’s knowing any English. AppleScript actually has no natural language intelligence at all. AppleScript is every bit as mathematically structured, rigid, and unforgiving as Perl or any other computer language. If you step outside its rules by a ...