From: Johann Hibschman <johannh@...>
Date: 2001-05-03T14:40:04+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:14579] Re: Ruby as a Mac OS/X scripting language

In article <20010503015954.60506.qmail@web9608.mail.yahoo.com>, Bryan
Zarnett <bryan_zarnett@yahoo.ca> wrote:

> Applescript is there, as is Perl.  I guess (IMHO) that
> they are looking for a substitute for Applescript.

Applescript isn't very functional yet.  It doesn't talk very well
to the Cocoa apps (i.e. the apps defined using the Objective-C
frameworks inherited from NeXT), and it's likely to be a lot of work
to get it going.

On the other hand, they already have a major investment in
AppleScript, so I'd be very suprised if they didn't just try to get
that working better with the rest of the system.

I'm using my Powerbook w/ OS X as a portable Unix workstation, which
suits me just fine.  I have Python working, Ruby working, and have
embedded Lua in Mac system apps.  It's fundamentally unix, which is
very nice.

Someone has already linked Lua to Objective C, so you can call all of
the system frameworks from the scripting language.  I haven't
experimented with it, but it's available online.  If Lua can do it, I
don't see why it would be that much harder for Ruby.

In any case, it sounds like fun.  ObjC and Ruby are similar in that
they're both spiritual children of Smalltalk, so I wouldn't be
surprised if a very satisfying link were possible.

--Johann