AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

Appendix A. The ‘aeut’ Resource

This appendix contains AppleScript’s 'aeut' resource, which is used for resolution of terminology as explained in Chapter 19.

The 'aeut' resource is divided into suites. The AppleScript Suite is automatically visible to the compiler; these are the global terms that make AppleScript work. The Type Names Suite is automatically visible to the compiler as well. So, for example, you can always use the activate command (see Chapter 18) because it is defined in the AppleScript Suite; and the rotation class is always recognized, even if you can’t usually do anything with it, because it is defined in the Type Names Suite. Applications may implement their own version of the Type Names Suite. It has the special feature that it is suppressed from the human-readable display of the application’s dictionary, so this is a place for terms that must be defined for compilation but that the user never needs to see.

The Standard Suite (also called the Core Suite) and the Text Suite are automatically visible to the compiler too, but they can be overridden and extended by individual applications, and terms within them don’t necessarily have any functional implementation in and of themselves, though some of them do. So, for example, the count command, defined in the Standard Suite, works on lists and strings. But the exists command, although it is defined in the Standard Suite and is recognized when you compile a script, does not actually do anything in AppleScript itself; ...