Comments on: Adobe Director: Type overloading using ancestors

Comment on Adobe Director: Type overloading using ancestors by: Hanford

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 02:11:18 +0000

Test.

Comment on Adobe Director: Type overloading using ancestors by: Phylobates

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:30:33 +0000

I’m been using director for years and you think you got it pretty much sussed when a little gem of knowledge like that pops up.. interesting. Tried with “rect” and it works beautifully. I’m sure I’ll find some use for it…

-- New rect object in script customRect
on new me

me.ancestor = rect(0,0,0,0)
return me
end

on diagonalLength me

return sqrt((me.width*me.width) + (me.height * me.height))
end

-- and lo and behold..

myrect = new script(“customRect”)
myrect.top = 50
myrect.right = 50
put myrect.diagonalLength()
-- 71

Comment on Adobe Director: Type overloading using ancestors by: ahoeben

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 12:25:28 +0000

The ‘on put me’ approach does not seem to work. Your reply got me thinking though, and the solution is as simple as:

myList = new(script(“BetterList”),[11,22,33])

put myList.ancestor
-- [11,22,33]

put myList.ancestor * 4
-- [44,88,132]

put myList.ancestor + [1,2,3]
-- [12,24,36]

Comment on Adobe Director: Type overloading using ancestors by: Hanford

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:51:28 +0000

Interesting about losing those aspects of list functionality. You can, of course write your own “put”, like this:

on put me
trace(ancestor)
end

I like the change you made to the “new” handler. Valentin does something similar, but in my original example I wanted it to be as simple as possible.

Comment on Adobe Director: Type overloading using ancestors by: ahoeben

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:09:24 +0000

If you change the ‘new’ handler slightly, you can set initial list values upon script initialisation:

on new me, aList

if not listP(aList) then aList = []
ancestor = aList

return me
end

usage:
myList = new(script(“BetterList”),[11,22,33])
put myList[2]
-- 22

While this technique is very usefull to add ‘methods’ to the list datatype (such as an ‘addOnce’ method to only add an item to a list if it is not already in the list, or an ‘append’ to append another list to this list, etc), you also loose a lot of list functionality:— you can no longer ‘put’ the list— you can no longer do arithmetics on the full list (eg multiply all list items by 2)
I think that’s the reason why acestors aren’t used more to extend datatypes…