Is it a bad sign that ASOC’s syntax pretty-printing has not be implemented in XCode 4 editor? You said ASOC was a low-level maintenance feature – does Apple wait to see if ASOC is widely used to do something more for it? If I have understood what DJ and you said previously, the ASOC bridge is in a framework, a run-time process, not a matter of editing or compiling. So why didn’t they create the syntax coloring?
One more question: shall I consider as a bug the fact that the “Syntax coloring” submenu does no more appear?
I suppose it’s a sign that we’re not high on the list of priorities of the Xcode team. You have to keep in mind that Apple isn’t a monolithic organization; different teams largely set their own priorities, and they conflict often enough. That’s why, for example, scripting support in Apple apps is so hit-and-miss.
And to be honest, I can understand the Xcode team having higher priorities at the moment; there are plenty of other things about Xcode 4 that still need work. My guess is that Xcode 4 isn’t really where they’d have liked it to be at this stage.
I think they made a bad design decision because they didn’t understand how AS works – they did what they did for other languages, and assumed that what it produced would be fine. I think that if enough people log bugs, there’s a reasonable chance they’ll rectify it. OTOH, if we just grumble about it here, nothing’s likely to happen.
What’s more important, IMO, is what the people in charge of ASObjC do or don’t do. And the fact that the Apple Lion page is trumpeting AppleScript Editor’s ability to produce apps that use ASObjC can only be seen as a good sign.
Does this mean that the ASObjC framework is more embedded in Applescript or that applescript can load frameworks? If it can load frameworks it could be possible that creating apps with script editor would be more easy than with Xcode. Also the possibilities (with thrid party frameworks) would make applescript a very rich scripting environment but this could also be a sign that scripting additions could be deprecated. Studio was already a form of a scripting addition and is also deprecated.
