[Pythonmac-SIG] appscript questions

[Nicholas Riley]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 06:08:26PM +0100, has wrote:
> So I'm more inclined towards the latter, but would like to know what
> others think.)

I agree - if the app quits, it should stay quit.  Sometimes when I'm
trying to abort a script I quit an app that's being controlled, and to
see it relaunch over and over and over again... aaargh.

> - Do away with ASTS completely and always retrieve and parse  
> terminology on the fly (less efficient, especially when repeatedly  
> running short scripts, but completely foolproof).
> 
> - Move to some sort of file-based cache, either managed completely  
> manually (users can selectively create terminology files for those  
> applications they want to avoid a cold start on), or automatically  
> (appscript could store all parsed terminologies in, say, /tmp).

I'd say to do the first one, and if you get complaints, move to the
second one.  I got very confused about the role of ASTS in remote
scripting myself (you may remember an email I sent you that effect
:-), and at least in my case I don't use appscript for small scripts,
I use it primarily for faceless background apps, so it wouldn't
matter.

> 3. Should appscript's built-in help() use textwrap to automatically  
> wrap long lines to fit in a standard 80-column terminal window? Or is  
> it better to leave the terminal window to wrap them naturally (i.e.  
> users may prefer to resize terminal windows themselves to make text  
> easier to read)?

How about wrapping to the terminal width, whatever it happens to be?
That's what most other things do.  (You could always have a
'wrap=False' option to help(), if necessary.)

-- 
Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>