Thanks Chris,

Is there any particular reason you're not using function parameters and return values?  QA1111 <http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1111.html> has sample code for doing this -- it's generally more straightforward than mucking around with property values.

I saw that article, and frankly, I found the number of new concepts in there daunting in comparison to OSASetProperty.  My focus was mainly on 'getting something working' and not on 'understanding how AppleEvents underpins AppleScript', and I saw enough in there to scare me away (such as this argument to AEBuildAppleEvent: "'----':[TEXT(@),TEXT(@),TEXT(@),TEXT(@),alis(@@)],'snam':TEXT(@)").

Incidentally, I discovered, through trial and error, the solution to my problem.  Though there was nothing wrong with the code snippet I posted here, there were two other problems.  (I'll be explicit here just in case someone else has the same problem.)

First, even though I specified my property in my applescript using mixed case, OSASetProperty seemed to insist that I use all lower-case.  I discovered this by using OSAGetPropertyNames() and the following code:

  AEDescList proplist;

  ON_ERROR( OSAGetPropertyNames( _scriptingComponent, kOSAModeNull,
                                 _script_id, &proplist ) );

  SInt32 item_count = -1;
  ON_ERROR( AECountItems(&proplist, &item_count) );

  for ( SInt32 i = 1; i <= item_count; i++ )
  {
    AEKeyword theKeyword;
    AEDesc theItem;

    ON_ERROR( AEGetNthDesc( &proplist, i, typeChar, &theKeyword,
                            &theItem ) );

    std::string text;
    Size size = AEGetDescDataSize( &theItem );
    std::vector<char> buf( size );
    AEGetDescData( &theItem, &buf[0], size );
    std::copy( buf.begin(), buf.end(), std::back_inserter( text ) );
    std::cout << text << "\n";
  }

(ON_ERROR is just a macro that calls a function that throws an exception with __FILE__ and __LINE__ if an error occurs).

The second problem was this: when calling OSALoadFile() or OSACompile(), I had to pass kOSAModeCompileIntoContext and not kOSAModeNull as the mode argument.  I don't have any idea why this is necessary, as this discovery was made by the beating-on-the-black-box-until-it-did-something-different mode of troubleshooting.

Now, lest everyone forms the opinion of me that I'm just some incorrigible hack, let me say this:  I have no aversions to spending time learning how a new (to me) framework works, and how to properly implement things using that new framework.  But this passing of data problem is such a minor part of this application that it did not seem to warrant a major expenditure in time. (That said, in this case the time it took beating-on-the-black-box _may_ have exceeded the time it would have taken to fully grok the suggested article ;)
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