Comments on: AS3 Data Structures For Game Developers (and more)

By: Antonín

Antonín — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 03:29:53 +0000

great, thanks for good post dude

By: John Dewar

John Dewar — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:41:54 +0000

I’m sure Mike figured this out long ago, but in case anyone else comes along here and wonders about it, the reason “&” “<” or “\” won’t work is that object["key"] is equivalent to object.key So the same naming restrictions that apply to all variable names apply to what you’re passing in between the brackets.

By: Chandima

Chandima — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:40:22 +0000

Hi David, Michael Baczynski from Polygonal labs is the author of this package. Kudos to him. I do agree that it is an excellent library.

By: David Whitten

David Whitten — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:40:06 +0000

This library is awesome. Im writing a chess game viewer with Flex 3, and i used the hash table class for a few things. Saved my butt.

Thanks for this great set of classes.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 31 May 2008 21:08:59 +0000

I have found in Flash CS3 that the ‘object as hash table’ does not work for keys that contain “&” “<” or “\”". Haven’t figured why yet, but it leads to some very weird behavior in my (limited) testing.

By: Jacob Wright

Jacob Wright — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:41:31 +0000

In AS 3 an Object is a Hash Table. The only difference if you get technical is the API. myHash.get(”key”) vs myObj["key"].

The difference in using an Object over an Array is the Array IS an Object, but with a load of methods for working with numerically indexed data. If all you need is a hash the Object is much lighter than the Array. It could also be confusing for someone (another developer) to see an array, iterate through it with a for (i = 0; i < length; i++) loop and get nothing out.

In short, it’s for the same reason why you’d use a Shape over a Sprite if you’re just drawing and a Sprite over a MovieClip if you don’t need to use the timeline.

By: RJE

RJE — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:40:56 +0000

Associative Arrays is just the general name for key/value data structures. There are many different ways to implement this with various tradeoffs. A Hash table is one of these implementations.

By: Bill Sanders

Bill Sanders — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:08:47 +0000

Hash tables come up a lot in DP examples from languages other than AS 3.0. The docs say that associative arrays, created using the Object class and not the Array class, can be used instead of hash tables. Does anyone know the difference between associative arrays and hash tables?