[TxMt] TM & UBB code some questions

[Chris Thomas]

On Jan 25, 2005, at 10:35 AM, Allan Odgaard wrote:

> On Jan 25, 2005, at 19:28, Allan Odgaard wrote:
>
>> AS integrates with other applications which one may use in 
>> combination with TextMate, like Automator, Script Editor [...]
>>
>>
>
> Also a point I forgot to mention, AS has been refined over many years 
> to be an application extension language, this means it has stuff like 
> event handlers, so not only can a script call TM, but a script can 
> setup hooks for TM to call (at least to the best of my knowledge) -- 
> the infrastructure for all this is already defined and partially 
> implemented, TM only needs to make use of it.
>
> There is no language I'm aware of which has similar capabilities, so 
> I'd have to invent a lot myself, which is more work and a bad idea.

What capabilities are you referring to? I mean, there's no functional 
difference between:

(1) Ruby, invoked using rb_call, IIRC

     def save_hook( path, encoding, etc )
     end

(2) AppleScript, invoked as described at 
http://www.scifihifi.com/weblog/mac/Cocoa-AppleEvent-Handlers.html

     on save_hook( path, encoding, etc )
     end save

To be clear, I believe that AppleScript support is a useful and 
TextMate should have it. I suspect, however, that it might be 
ultimately orthogonal to the question of an embedded scripting 
language. AppleScript requires a lot of overhead to perform the 
simplest of tasks. AppleScript also does not provide much in the way of 
object-oriented language features. For just one example, one way to get 
wide-ranging SCM support might be to export a simple Ruby object:

module TextMate
     class VersionControlSystem
         def file_remote_status(paths*)...
         def file_editable?...
         def commit_files!(paths*)...
         ...
     end
end

Then it would be possible for users to subclass this object to support 
the less-popular RCS systems -- Perforce, svk, darcs... This sort of 
thing would be downright painful to implement with AppleScript.

Chris