ActionScript as a teaching language

[Peter]

On Mon, 2 Jan 2006, Paul King wrote:

> ActionScript is into Version 3, now that it is no longer a Macromedia product
> (Adobe closed the deal to acquire Macromedia in mid-December). As of version 2,
> it is object-oriented to the point where you can make your own objects, but the
> scoping in version 2 was still, to me at least, a hodgepodge of scoping to
> timelines, graphics, curly brackets, with no unified place to place all your
> code. It appears as though for most things you need to click on an object or
> timeline, then Flash opens up a new editing buffer for it and you just write code
> for that object. If a visual object has a timeline, it is not clear to me when
> you attach the code to the object and when you attach it to the timeline.
> Everything is too tied to the interface to be sure of anything, especially when
> things get bigger and bigger. On the actionscript newsgroups, there appears to be
> general agreement that AS's biggest drawback is in how the editor handles the
> code, by segmenting it in the way I described.

You can write as without a gui using data from 
http://www.actionscripts.org/ . It has a strong Java flavor when used 
like this, with a 'document' model reminiscent of DOM. Of course the 
output is a gui and you can interact with it.

Peter
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