Comments on: Flexible Loop Syntax

By: Map

Map — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:36:33 +0000

Oh, The code in comment #2 works for me in Flash CS3. The error it throws (if compile in Flash IDE) is not related to the strange loop syntax.

By: Alec McEachran

Alec McEachran — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:21:16 +0000

Just a couple of additional bit of information:

If you attempt to compile your test code (from comment #2 above) in Flash CS3, it does not compile.

FDT does flag it up as an error, but as you rightly point out, then the MXML compiler doesn’t catch it at compile.

Weird.

Regards, Alec

By: jackson

jackson — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:23:57 +0000

I hadn’t thought to do that. I just tried it though:

trace("before");
 
function getNames(): Array { return ["name1","name2"]; }
 
// assume getNames() returns an array with length 2
for each (var name:String in getNames(), ["extra name"])
{
    trace(name);
}
 
trace("after");

And I get:

before
extra name
after

So it seems as though the comma operator is evaluating to the second argument and the loop is then iterating over that. I wonder if this is useful for anything…

Thank you for the tip!

By: Troy Gilbert

Troy Gilbert — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:10:55 +0000

What if you tried this:

for each (var name:String in getNames(), ["extra name"])

Both false and true don’t evaluate to lists, so it doesn’t surprise me that the loop gets skipped for either of those.