Re: FLASH: FLASH 4 Scripting Language?

[Nigel Randsley-Pena]

Pieter,


This might be a bit more than you wanted to know, but then you did ask

;)

Flash 4 has as you know a Scripting Language I haven't seen any

documentation on it from Macromedia yet and the following is a result of

my analysis so it might not correspond 100% to the true implementation.

Flash Action Scripting is stack oriented. Data is pushed onto a stack

and operators pop data, process it and push the result, if any, back

onto the stack. If you are familiar with Forth or other languages based

on the Reverse Polish Notation you'll have an understanding of how it

works. All data and operators, are encoded based on the familiar swf

file format used for Flash3 and the actions are encoded as Action

Records. Processing is sequential and the instructions include branch

actions, with the engine using the address of each instruction so as to

know where to branch. Branch actions have an offset operand that can

take positive and negative values, coupling this with a Program Counter

enables all necessary jump to's.

An interesting side note is that we seem to have more actions than

instructions, as would be expected, as some of the actions are

redundant, like the while action or some of the compare actions.


Nigel


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