and here's a Perl tutorial:[snip way too many lines of tutorial, apparently intended to make perl look a lot harder than it is]
Here is what, perhaps, you meant:
Open BBEdit Type print "Hello, world." Run the script
Yes, that's one way to run a Perl script, but Apple doesn't bundle BBEdit with OS X. I wasn't trying to make Perl look harder than it is. I was illustrating the baseline of knowledge you need to get started.
Now that you've mastered Perl and Applescript, it should be trivial to use either language to create a script that extracts information from a FileMaker database and places it into a QuarkXPress template, then imports images into the document from a remote server, applies the appropriate style sheets to the text, prints the document on a color printer, exports the document as a PDF, saves the text as an HTML file, then opens the HTML file in BBEdit.
Yes, quite. A snippet:
use Mac::Glue; my $fm = new Mac::Glue 'FileMaker Pro';
$fm->obj(file => $file)->open;
# get fields my @fields = $fm->prop(name => fields => database => 1)->get;
# get records where second cell isn't empty my @data = $fm->obj(records => whose(NOT => [cell => 2, equals => '']), database => 1 )->get;
etc.
Or did you intend to mean that manipulating data in AppleScript was hard?
If you find this difficult to accomplish in Perl
I don't. :-)
I think you might be a special case. Not everyone has written Mac::Glue or maintained MacPerl. If you are claiming that you can do everything with Perl and Mac::Glue that you can with Applescript, then I won't dispute you. But don't pretend it's just as easy for a novice.
My original point stands: getting rid of Applescript because Robin prefers Perl is a bad idea.
I wish I had cross-posted my original reply to MACSCPT so we could have a proper flamewar.
-- Chip Howland The Sportsman's Guide
