TABLE OF CONTENTS Classes and Object Oriented Programming techniques are important, powerful, helpful, modern, etc. But the essential building blocks of code haven't changed since the dawn of computing when vacuum tubes were new.
To make any kind of program work, several things are required:
Memory to store data: Variables.
The ability to manipulate data: Operators.
Control over the order of operation: Statements.
A way to make code modular: Functions.
It may be helpful to know that all computer languages are the same essentially. The most powerful chips (CPUs) in use today all do pretty much the same things. And today's chips are pretty much the same as yesterdays. They are just faster and have fewer resource limitations. Likewise, programs are bigger and more "feature-rich" but they operate in the same way as the first Eniac programs:
Get some data
Manipulate the data
Make some decisions about the data
Store the data
Get some more data
It should come as no surprise, then, that the essential building blocks of AS2 code are the same as they were for AS1.
Programs retrieve, manipulate, and store data in memory. At the hardware level, this memory exists as microscopic transistor networks. In ActionScript, memory exists in the form of variables. A variable is a container that stores a piece of data. The location of the container doesn't change, but the contents can. To access memory on a memory chip, the memory address must be known. Early programmers...
