Kerry,
You should turn Strict mode on your FLAs in the publish profile
settings. If you click on the language (the place you set your class
paths and if you want Flash to auto-declare stage instances), you should
see a checkbox for strict mode. Turn it on.
The reason you want strict mode is because it will catch errors that the
normal Flash compiler does not. Strict mode will help you quite a bit
and expose obvious errors that the normal Flash compiler does not catch,
which results in confusing runtime errors that should have been caught
during compiling. I wish there was a way to turn Strict mode on by
default, but AFAIK, you have to do it manually for every Flash file.
Leaving variables untyped is loose coding and AS3 is all about enforcing
strict coding. Using * as a wildcard type is not generally something
you want to do, but it's there for you if you need it (notable
exceptions include specific game programming situations where it's been
proven faster to iterate over certain wildcard variables than typed ones).
In the example given, the proper way of doing that would be to do what I
originally said; either have both classes extend the same abstract and
cast the var to the abstract, or have both classes implement the same
interface and cast the var to that. In this case, you can probably get
away with a wildcard, but you should never leave a variable untyped.
At the very least, you're making your code more readable in the sense
that you're explicitly setting a type as a wildcard and it's clear in
the code that's what you wanted, vs you forgot to set a type.
HTH,
Steven
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