On Jul 3, 2007, at 10:18 AM, Francisco Diaz Trepat - gmail wrote:
..
> Has anybody seen it, heard of it, developed it?

F-Script is cool, and a great way to explore the Cocoa API. Because  
of it, I finally gained some respect for the Cocoa API as something  
similar in power as your run of the mill Smalltalk class library.   
I've used it to write some scripts for when I was using a Newton a  
lot still- I wrote a 5 line script in F-Script that took a PDF and  
outputted an HTML page with PNGs for each page of the PDF. No PDF  
readers for the Newton OS, and this was a pretty decent way to read  
some PDFs.  Because of its great interactivity for playing with and  
discovering what Cocoa provides, it was the ideal environment to  
figure this out in. I then took the F-Script and brought it over to  
Squeak, where I was using the ObjC bridge to do the same calls, but  
also a little web interfacing with Comanche (go to page, put PDF url,  
do ObjC calls, return HTML linking to PNGs). It was pretty slick and  
took less time than compiling GhostScript on my machine at the time.

That said, I would like it more if you could actually develop with  
it. While I like the Cocoa API, you can't use F-Script to develop  
applications for Cocoa, completely. You can't create new subclasses,  
so it is confined to scripting. I don't know about F-Script's  
internals, but it seems to me that it wouldn't be too hard to flesh  
out into a usable, more complete Smalltalk-with-Cocoa-libs  
implementation for developing full apps without the need to write  
code in both F-Script and ObjC.

I don't quite understand the excitement some folks get over the @  
operand for basically doing #collect:. I mean, it's cool, but I was  
able to implement it in Squeak in minutes. It's impressive for folks  
who have been stuck in a block-less language, I don't blame them for  
that!

Regards,
Aaron