ActionScript 3 Language Specification 
ActionScript 3 Language Specification |
|||
| ActionScript 3.0 Language Specification > 2 Design perspective > 2.4 Choosing between reliability and flexibility | |||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
Whereas the original purpose of ECMAScript was to provide a scripting language for automating web pages and other hosted applications where lenient runtime behavior is preferred and scripts are small enough that performance is often not a concern, libraries written in ECMAScript can be very large and complex, and be constrained by aggressive performance requirements. These libraries are often created ahead of time using IDEs and stand-alone compilers. In this case, developers are willing to give up some flexibility to be guaranteed that certain kinds of errors will not occur at runtime, and that their code will run as efficiently as possible.
Also, it is desirable when targeting low-powered platforms to minimize the amount of processing that must occur to execute programs on the client.
Therefore, edition 4 allows developers to trade flexibility and compatibility for reliability and efficiency by choosing a well-defined subset of ECMAScript that can be compiled ahead-of-time for more aggressive compile-time semantic analysis and optimization.
Send me an e-mail when comments are added to this page | Comment Report
Current page: http://livedocs.adobe.com/specs/actionscript/3/as3_specification16.html