AppleScript code to read file contents into a list (array)

I just ran into a situation where I wanted to use AppleScript to read some file contents into a list/array, and came up with the following code:

set theFile to "/Users/al/Projects/Scala/Sarah/scripts/thank_you.data"
set fileHandle to open for access theFile
set thankYous to paragraphs of (read fileHandle)
close access fileHandle

I can confirm that this code works on my Mac OS X 10.6.8 system. The variable thankYous is a list/array that contains the lines from my file.

After reading the file contents into a list, I then use the following code to have my computer randomly "speak" one of the lines that I retrieved from the file:

set numThanks to count of thankYous
set rn to (random number from 1 to numThanks)
set reply to item rn of thank_yous
say reply

An AppleScript file reading function

In the real world, what I actually did was to create this AppleScript file-reading code as a function:

--
-- An AppleScript function that reads a file and returns the lines
-- from that file as a list.
--
on returnFileContentsAsList(theFile)
  set fileHandle to open for access theFile
  set theLines to paragraphs of (read fileHandle)
  close access fileHandle
  return theLines
end

I then call this function like this:

set thank_yous to CommonLib's returnFileContentsAsList("/Users/al/Projects/Scala/Sarah/scripts/thank_you.data")
set numThanks to count of thank_yous
set rn to (random number from 1 to numThanks)
set reply to item rn of thank_yous
say reply

In summary, if you need some AppleScript code that demonstrates how to read file contents into an array/list, I hope these examples has been helpful.