ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

Statements

We saw in earlier chapters how ActionScript stores and manipulates data. In this

chapter we’ll see how to do things with that data. We’ll give Flash instructions in the

form of statements, or phrases of code that instruct the interpreter to perform a speci-

fied task.

To make something happen in Flash—whether stopping a sound, playing a movie,

running a function, or repeatedly executing some code—we use a statement. In fact,

an ActionScript program can be defined as nothing more than a list of statements

that tell the interpreter what we want Flash to do. Here, for example, is an entire

ActionScript program, which consists of four statements and tells the interpreter to

load a web page into the browser:

var protocol = "http"; // Statement 1

var domain = "www.moock.org"; // Statement 2

var path = "webdesign/flash/"; // Statement 3

getURL(protocol + "://" + domain + "/" + path); // Statement 4

Scripting a movie with ActionScript is simply a matter of attaching statements to

frames, movie clips, and buttons. Unless instructed otherwise, Flash performs each

statement in the order in which it appears in the script (later we’ll explore how and

when Flash decides which script to execute). This chapter explores the syntactic

makeup of statements and lists the general ...