Cosma Colanicchia, what I'm trying to say is that the perceived simplicity of another approach is not such. The entire process is more complex, and you cannot reduce it's complexity beyond certain level. Granted the approach you illustrated, certain essential parts will be lost. This is the situation called "leaky abstractions", i.e. when an attempt to abstract further (an attempt to reduce complexity in this case) will produce more problems then it solves. What you are trying to show as simple doesn't have necessary parts any non-trivial program will require. When these parts are added, the solution you suggest will not be any less complex then the existing one, more so, it will probably more complex and clumsy because it is not designed to handle the real life situations.
Well, you shouldn't return anything from an event handler, that's the limitation of the system, however it doesn't affect the type check, because you don't expect handlers to return anything anyway (you are never in a situation that would allow you to expect anything to be returned from a handler). Same thing about if blocks or loop blocks - they don't return anything in AS3. This is unfortunate, but this is a limitation of the system. Trying to lift this limitation would result in a more complex implementation, possibly, the results aren't worth the effort. There is yet another concern. Older languages, such as C++ illustrated that when you have an API that duplicates another API, the language overall becomes more complex and the programmers will become superstitious about one kind of the API. I don't see any benefit of your approach compared to what already exists. Having two different approaches is worse then having only one in this particular case. In any case, I think I said this already. If and when there will be threads / workers / processes / w/e it'll be called, what you suggest will certainly get used a lot, because it's something that, on the surface of it, is "asking to be done". So that will be another case of newbies coming to forums / irc for help and being educated not to do it in the way you suggest because of non-obvious complications that will certainly happen. It's the same case as it is today with anonymous functions, use of 'with' construct etc - something that on the surface of it should make the work easier, but in reality complicates it that much, you would rather avoid it as a rule. --- Martin, This suggest reduced quality in exchange for simpler implementation - something that I personally wouldn't accept, but I'm not arguing this should be the case for everyone. Best. Oleg
