F-Script is based on a pure object paradigm: every entity manipulated within the language is an object. Its base syntax and concepts are identical to those of the language Smalltalk with specific extensions to support array programming as in the language APL. F-Script provides an interpreted, interactive environment with support for workspaces, which provide a rich set of functions including object persistence, distributed objects, graphical user interface framework, database access, among other things.
Syntax
Like Smalltalk, F-Script's syntax is very simple, without requiring specific notation for control structures which are provided in a unified manner by the message send operation. Unlike Smalltalk, F-Script provides specific notational extensions to support the Arrayclass, using curly brackets to describe literal arrays, which may contain any F-Script expressions. For example, is a valid array literal. The empty array is denoted by . Arrays of arrays are supported transparently, since any array is just another object.
Message sending
Message expressions in F-Script are similar to those in Smalltalk: they specify which object is the receiver of the message, which operation is called by the message, and any argument objects needed by the operation. F-Script supports unary, binary, and keyword messages. F-Script message semantics are extended to support array programming by recognizing that an array operation, such as adding to numerical vectors, must be viewed as generating a number of messages relating the elements of the vectors involved Thus, if A = and B = , then F-Script allows A + B = .
Usage
F-Script is chiefly used as a lightweight scripting layer on top of macOS's Cocoaapplication programming interface. It can be embedded in applications using the F-Script framework and Interface Builder palettes. It can also be used interactively from the F-Script interpreter to prototype applications. Finally, it can be used to explore applications' object hierarchies using an injector such as F-Script Anywhere.
Forks
The original F-script development by Philippe Mougin stopped at version 2.1 in 2011. Ilya Kulakov took over the FScript.org website and updated the program to work with Mac OS X 10.7 through 10.10 until version 2.3 of 2014, building off Jonathan Mitchell's modernization work. Kulakov noted that as F-Script ties deeply into the system, the code must be changed to reflect the framework available in each Mac OS X release. The last update to this chain of work was done in 2018, by Wolfgang Baird, who updated F-Script to work with Mac OSX 10.12.
