Cocoa Scripting: Return a floating point (double) value for "any" type

Question

When specifying the any type for a command result in the Sdef, it seems that one cannot simply return the NS types such as NSNumber. Instead, one needs to return an NSAppleEventDescriptor.

However, NSAppleEventDescriptor is rather limited in the values it can handle. There appears to be no support for floating point numbers such as C's double type.

How do I return double values for the any type, then?

Answer 1

10.11 has a direct way, a doubleValue property, for system versions prior to 10.11 you can coerce the descriptor with the method coerceToDescriptorType to one of these types

typeIEEE32BitFloatingPoint = 'sing',
typeIEEE64BitFloatingPoint = 'doub',
type128BitFloatingPoint = 'ldvl',

For example code see AppleScriptToolKit