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May 2007

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Subject:
From:
Walter Ian Kaye <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Macintosh Scripting Systems <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 4 May 2007 15:37:18 -0700
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At 07:52 a -0700 05/04/2007, John Baxter didst inscribe upon an 
electronic papyrus:

>On May 4, 2007, at 12:38 AM, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
>
>>It really should have been done instead of VBA in the first place, 
>>but probably some corporate people demanded VBA on the Mac side and 
>>so AS got short shrift. Now that is finally being rectified, and we 
>>are getting a Microsoft app that really *is* designed with the Mac 
>>as focus, not Windows.
>
>Actually, it was done that way in the first place.  Excel was 
>scriptable (using Frontier) before AppleScript was released and was 
>scriptable without change when AS came out.

What I meant was that VBA should never have been ported to the Mac. 
When it was, the AEOM was subverted in favor of the VBA model, and 
AppleScript was reduced to just another way of doing VBA. Yuck. That 
was one of Microsoft's biggest mistakes. You couldn't even do a 
simple 'get data' without relying on VBA functions to return a 
result, and half the time that didn't even work. Ugh. I try not to 
think about all that horror.

>There were some rough  edges--the most annoying being that the 
>identifier 'text' (or maybe  'TEXT'--it's been a long time--was 
>"stolen" by AppleScript for its  own (and higher, IMHO) purpose.  In 
>Excel at that time, that property  of a cell was the as-formatted 
>contents of the cell.  I worked around  it by installing a modified 
>'aete' resource into my copy of Excel,  giving that property another 
>name.  (I never released the modified  'aete' for copyright 
>reasons--I did describe it (on this very list).
>
>   --John

Yeah, I remember that. :-)

-boo

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