🚀 go-pugleaf

in article ef9f3eb.2@WebX.aaQKaf7vad4, Peter Boctor wrote:

> I don't know the original reason for this, but I find it quite confusing. Why
> should text be the one exception?

It's an exception in the name of consistency ;-)

Let's say I have this statement:

set myWord to word 1 of "Why should text be the one exception?"

myWord will contain "Why", and not a reference to the first word of the
string. Could it realistically do anything else?

Now let's try something roughly like this:

tell app "InDesign 1"
set myWord to word 1 of "Why should text be the one exception?"
set yourWord to word 1 of story 1 of document 1
set otherWord to word 1 of label of text frame 1 of document 1
end tell

Here, "word 1 of..." will return different things depending on the target,
and that too can be quite confusing.

I guess the bottom line is that some apps don't need/use references, so it's
more consistent for the sake of the language if everyone adopts the same
convention.

> A little historical background: Prior to InDesign 1.5 (I think, I'm fuzzy on
> when this happened) InDesign returned object references all the time. We
> didn't have an "object reference" property since all objects implicitly
> returned an object reference. We got complaints from some diehard
> AppleScripters so we changed the behavior and in the process introduced the
> property "object reference"

Further historical background. In the first scriptable version of Brand X,
it returned the contents all the time. It didn't have an "object reference"
property for text. They got complaints and in the process introduced the
property "object reference" for text.

-- some diehard AppleScripter