ActionScript: => was {Re: [Edu-sig] Top 5 All Time Novice Obstacles => #3 Where am I ?}

[Jason Cunliffe]

> I've not looked much at it personally, but I trust a close colleague
> who has, and who finds it hard to use because the parser cannot know
> the end of a function's parameter list -- that's only known at run
> time, once the function is called.  Sounds like dead on arrival to me,
> as far as language design goes.

hmm... I do not understand what your friend means about the parser.
I don't know much about parsers, but will ask around more.

> Flash: Around 1996 I was approached by Macromedia to become their
> director of language design.  I declined, for a number of personal
> reasons, and because I didn't think I would be able to steer them
> sufficiently far away from where they were at the time.  Since then,
> it appears that they have adopted Javascript; they could've done
> worse.  Javascript shares some decent concepts with Python, in a more
> traditional syntax.  (I think part of this may be due to Jim Roskind,
> who was at Netscape at the time that JS was developed, but was an
> early Python adopter at Infoseek before then.)

ahaa. Macromedia's loss but Python's gain, and I hope your own too !
You probably made a very wise decision. They flounderd until 1998/99 when Flash
5 jumped and adopted ECMAscript [Javascript]. It's not bad though.
Moving between Python and Actionscript/Javascript is pretty painless. Too many
{ } ;
but it does share many nice features.

Misses Python's dictionary core, but one can fake some it with the As/Js
Associative Arrays:

ideas = new array(3);
ideas['python']       = 'programming is fun';
ideas['actionscript'] = 'flash is fun';
ideas['edu-sig']      = 'everyone can enjoy learning to program';

I don't know of any way to match Python's superb keyword args syntax :-(
It's one of the feature which I think makes Pyhon especially accessible as a
'first' language.

> I'd like to add that Flash succeeded where Java applets have failed.

Yes I agree, and interesting to see how Java has moved into larger server-side
component projects and stand-alone applications.

./Jason