On May 24, 2006, at 8:24 AM, Duane L. Mitchell wrote: > ((current date) - pReferenceDate) > > I was hoping it would be more interesting than this. I had all the > various > solution scripts to try and did not get the chance to run them. I > suppose > the question remains how can one create the above expression on a PPC > machine so that it works on an Intel machine without having to > recompile. > Perhaps using one or another of the previously suggested solutions > for both > sides of the minus sign would work? Subject to correction, of course, I'm reasonably sure that the problem is not with current date but with the value compiled into pReferenceDate. It seems highly probably that Apple failed to make compiled date values portable between PPC and Mac (which would have required code in the PPC version to deal with dates with the PPC byte order--very different in a signed 64-bit number from the Intel byte order. The various scripting solutions which involve injecting the parts of a date into a date value, at run time, work around the problem, and are most likely the best workaround we'll have until (a) Apple releases a fix and (b) all clients are on some unknown version after 10.4.6 (that is, approximately, forever). We have enough information now for someone with both sorts of machines (I lack an Intel) to determine whether Jan 1, 1904 00:00:01 is compiled as 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 or 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 in Intel. In PPC it is 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 The fancy formatting which makes a date object look like a date is done at display time. --John (who long ago wrote Frontier code which would turn an incoming AppleScript date into a Frontier date--that code may now be broken depending on the above layout determination)