Well, the first impression of AppleScript I had has not been abolished as of yet. It's still bothering me that some lines look exactly like English, whereas other lines look like the spacebar on the keyboard was broken and the person typing at the keyboard knows what English words look like, but not what they mean.
Regardless, I'm sure I'll get used to it (I still have a certain degree of fear any time I see a regular expression with lots of backslashes and symbol characters, which is to say most of the time I see a regular expression).
I've set part of the PDF a-printin' and plan to use the next 53 minutes to attempt to debug Matriarch again. May luck smile upon me...
I'd rather program in Perl, where there are so many ways to do it that it looks deceptively hard to learn to do, but actually turns out to be quite easy.