We saw in earlier chapters how ActionScript stores and manipulates data. In this chapter we'll see how to do things with that data. We'll give Flash instructions in the form of statements, or phrases of code that instruct the interpreter to perform a specified task.
To make something happen in Flash�whether stopping a sound, playing a movie, running a function, or repeatedly executing 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. Unless instructed otherwise, Flash performs each statement in the order in which it appears in the script (later we'll explore how and when Flash decides which script to execute). 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.