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.

Numeric Literals

|

79

Integer Literals

Integer literals, such as 1, 2, 3, 99, and -200, must follow these rules:

• Integers may not contain a decimal point or fractional value.

• Integers must not exceed the minimum or maximum legal numeric values of

ActionScript. See the

MIN_VALUE and MAX_VALUE properties of the Number object

in the Language Reference for a discussion of legal values.

• Base-10 integer numbers must not start with a leading zero (e.g., these are not

valid base-10 integers: 002, 000023, and 05).

Not all integer values are base-10 (i.e., decimal) integers. ActionScript also supports

base-8 (octal) and base-16 (hexadecimal) numeric literals. For a primer on decimal,

octal, and hexadecimal numbers, see:

http://www.moock.org/asdg/technotes/basePrimer/

We use a leading zero to indicate an octal number. For example, to represent the

octal number 723 in ActionScript, we use:

0723 // 467 in decimal (7*64 + 2*8 + 3*1)

To indicate a hexadecimal (hex for short) literal integer, we put 0x (or 0X) in front of

the number, such as:

0x723 // 1827 in decimal (7*256 + 2*16 + 3*1)

0xFF // 255 in decimal (15*16 + 15*1)

Hexadecimal numbers are often used to indicate color values, but most simple pro-

grams require only base-10 numbers. Be careful to remove unwanted leading zeros

when converting strings ...