14 Mar 1994 | Print  |

John Baxter

by Adam C. Engst

John Baxter <jwbaxter@pt.olympus.net> writes:

I've run into something that grammar mavens may find interesting. Consider this correct [English version] AppleScript code:

   tell word 4 of paragraph 2 of document 1 of application "Scriptable Text Editor"
     get it's text
   end tell

Here, Apple has managed to make AppleScript syntax so English-like that it commits the all-too-common mistake of using "it's" instead of "its" as the possessive.

You can of course also write that statement as:

     get the text of it

That sounds terribly stilted, but at least avoids the incorrect use of the contraction in place of the possessive. One of the amusing things is that Apple has the potential of running into such problems in each language for which they provide an AppleScript dialect

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