ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

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Creating Variables (Declaration)

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The programming industry’s most popular alternative to Flash’s suggested variable

naming conventions is known as Hungarian notation, developed by a Hungarian

Microsoft engineer, Charles Simonyi. For information, see:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/hunganotat.htm

For a discussion of the pros and cons of Hungarian notation, see:

http://ootips.org/hungarian-notation.html

Creating dynamically named variables

Although you’ll rarely, if ever, use dynamically created variable names, it’s possible

to generate the name of a variable programmatically. This technique was used prima-

rily before arrays were introduced in Flash 5, so you will often encounter it in legacy

code intended for Flash 4 or earlier. To create a variable name from any expression,

use the set statement. For example, here we assign the value “bruce” to the variable

player1name:

var i = 1;

set ("player" + i + "name", "bruce");

Arrays and objects, discussed in later chapters, provide us with a much more power-

ful means of tracking dynamically named data and should be used instead of

dynamic variable names.

Declare Variables at the Outset

It’s good practice to declare your application’s variables at the beginning of every

movie’s main script space, which is usually the first keyframe ...