User Guide

Overview of built-in classes 199
About class (static) members
Some built-in ActionScript classes have class members (or static members). Class members
(properties and methods) are accessed or invoked on the class name, not on an instance of the
class. Therefore, you don’t create an instance of the class to use those properties and methods.
For example, all the properties of the Math class are static. The following code invokes the
max()
method of the Math class to determine the larger of two numbers:
var largerNumber:Number = Math.max(10, 20);
Overview of built-in classes
This section lists all the ActionScript classes, including a brief description of each class and cross-
references to other relevant sections of the documentation.
For purposes of understanding ActionScript, the classes are divided into the following two
categories:
• “Core classes” on page 199
• “Classes specific to Flash Player” on page 200
Core classes
The core ActionScript classes are borrowed directly from ECMAScript. In the Actions toolbox,
these classes are located in the Built-in Classes > Core directory.
Class Description
arguments An array that contains the values that were passed as parameters to any
function. See “arguments object” in Flash ActionScript Language Reference
Array The Array class represents arrays in ActionScript and all array objects are
instances of this class. The Array class contains methods and properties for
working with array objects. See “Array class” in Flash ActionScript Language
Reference.
Boolean The Boolean class is a wrapper for Boolean (
true or false) values. See
“Boolean class”in Flash ActionScript Language Reference.
Date The Date class shows how dates and times are represented in ActionScript,
and it supports operations for manipulating dates and times. The Date class
also provides the means for obtaining the current date and time from the
operating system. See “Date class”in Flash ActionScript Language
Reference.
Error The Error class contains information about runtime errors that occur in your
scripts. You typically use the
throw statement to generate an error condition,
which you can handle using a
try.catch.finally statement. See
try..catch..finally and “Error class”in Flash ActionScript Language
Reference.
Function The Function class is the class representation of all ActionScript functions,
including those native to ActionScript and those that you define. See
“Function class” in Flash ActionScript Language Reference.