So yesterday and today became all-day marathon coding sessions in a headlong rush attempt to get the “beta list” done by tomorrow. One could say that this effort is not going so well.
The problem of the day today? Trying to decide whether two objects are the same thing. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? And if we were using Java, it would be. Just override the equals() method and you’re good to go.
ActionScript, naturally, has no such method. The documentation of exactly how comparisons work is vague at best, so I have no idea if an equality test is checking each of the object’s properties or if it’s just checking to see if its the same object (that is, the same memory location). I think it’s the former, at least in general, but I have no idea how consistent this behavior is. Not that it matters, because when I want to compare two User objects, all I care about is if the username is the same. There’s no way to make this comparison (as far as I can tell) without sprinkling O(n²) loops throughout the code. This is another one of those things that is unbelievably annoying.
Also annoying is this “duplicate definition” warning I just got. In Java, if I create a for loop and create a variable i in the loop definition, it gets GCed and goes away after the loop is over. Apparently, not so in ActionScript.
Anyhow, if you can’t tell, I’m more than a little pissed off now, so after being at this all damn day with not much to show for it, I’m quitting for the night. No, beta is not happening this week; of the four items on the list, the filtering refactoring is about 50% done and everything else is 0% done. Over the weekend I might do some work on those other items and come back to the filtering on Monday.
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