Chapter 6. Statements

To make something happen in Flash -- whether stopping a sound, playing a movie, running a function, or looping some code -- we use a statement. In fact, an ActionScript program can be defined as nothing more than a list of statements that tell the interpreter what we want Flash to do. Here, for example, is an entire ActionScript program, which consists of four statements and tells the interpreter to load a web page into the browser:

var protocol = "http";                                   // Statement 1
var domain = "www.moock.org";                            // Statement 2
var path = "webdesign/flash/";                           // Statement 3
getURL(protocol + "://" + domain + "/" + path);          // Statement 4

Scripting a movie with ActionScript is simply a matter of attaching statements to frames, movie clips, and buttons. This chapter explores the syntactic makeup of statements and lists the general statement categories. We'll touch on all the ActionScript statements in this chapter, but some of the more important ones will be examined in detail in later chapters.