Activewords and Autoit

[flippertie]

Autoit Newb here.

I've been looking for a quick way to dump current date and time to the windows clipboard. I have a hotkey app that will run an exe - but couldnt find anything to generate the current date/time. But I found Autoit instead. So my first script is below. And it works! I type "dat", hit the F8 button and the date is inserted in my document. Simple stuff but it makes me happy!

Questions:

Would it be faster to compress the lscript down to one long line of code?

Does it make much difference to the speed of execution if I compile the script? or copy code from <date.au3> instead of including it? Do you have any rough measurement of how much difference ?

Obviously in a 2 line script it doesnt matter much, but when I grow into a code generating machine ;-) it might. and the scripts I write will mostly be hotkey/text related so saving a fraction of a second here and there makes a difference to the

perception of how well it works.

Thanks for any comments.

;----------------------------------------------------------------------------

; AutoIt Version: 3.0

; Date: 21-Dec-2004

; Function: Push current date/time to clipboard and paste to current app

; Format = dd-MMM-yy hh:mm

; ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

; Include preprogrammed Date functions

#include <date.au3>

; $iformat 0 = Long name of the month 1 = Abbreviated name of the month

$shortmonth = _DateMonthOfYear(@mon, 1 )

$MyTime = @hour & ":" & @min & " "

$mydate = @mday & "-" & $shortmonth& "-" & StringRight( @year, 2 ) & " "

;MsgBox(1, "Test ", $mydate & $MyTime ,4 )

Send ( $mydate & $MyTime )

ClipPut ( $mydate & $MyTime )

[buzz44]

Autoit Newb here.

Questions: 

Would it be faster to compress the lscript down to one long line of code?

Does it make much difference to the speed of execution if I compile the script? or copy code from <date.au3> instead of including it? Do you have any rough measurement of how much difference ?

Obviously in a 2 line script  it doesnt matter much, but when I grow into a code generating machine  ;-)  it might.    and the scripts I write will mostly be hotkey/text related so saving a fraction of a second here and there makes a difference to the

perception of how well it works.

question 1... wat is lscript, typo? and how are u going to compress it

question 2... i dont think having the script compiled or not makes any difference, and if it did it would be very minimal, ie. milliseconds?

hope that helps , im also very new to autoit too so dont just take my "advice", u should confirm with other ppl to

Edited January 3, 2005 by burrup

[flippertie]

question 1... wat is lscript, typo? and how are u going to compress it

Yup typo.

Compress by putting it all in one statement - something like this:

Send ( @mday & "-" & $shortmonth& "-" & StringRight( @year, 2 ) & " " & @hour & ":" & @min & " ").

I could probably get the shortmonth into there as well. My real question is for the developers - When a script is compiled is there much performance penalty for splitting a long line of code into shorter ones. Short ones are easler to read but fewer lines compile faster code. Or that'w what I remember from a previous life when I was a programmer (Cobo?, Basic anyone....)

Thanks,

[sugi]

"Compilation" for AutoIt only adds an wrapper to the AU3 script that interprets the script everytime you run the EXE-file. So there's practically no difference between a compiled script and an au3 scriptfile except that you only need to distribute the EXE-file if you want others to run your script.

[flippertie]

"Compilation" for AutoIt only adds an wrapper to the AU3 script that interprets the script everytime you run the EXE-file. So there's practically no difference between a compiled script and an au3 scriptfile except that you only need to distribute the EXE-file if you want others to run your script.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks for that. I guess that means trying to fit as much as possible into one line would make for fractionally faster scripts that are almost unreadable...

Flip