mikemo

In honor of the date, and in the spirit of the old Obfuscated C Code Contest, I’ve written a bit of code to demonstrate some of the more, shall we say, interesting things you can do with ActionScript.

The code:

package {
    import flash.display.*
    import flash.text.*

    public class AprilFools extends Sprite {
        エイプリルフール var Number = 4..toString()

        use namespace エイプリルフール

        function AprilFools()
        {
            get = set
            set = get

            with (createTextField())
                text = new Date(Number).toDateString()
        }

        function get get() { return Number + <><{Number}
            b={"/"+Number.split(/\//)[0]*502.25}/></>..@b }
        function set get(set) { Number = set+'/'+set/4 }

        function get set() { return Number }
        function set set(get) { Number = get }

        // nothing fun here
        function createTextField():TextField
        {
            stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
            stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
            var textField:TextField = new TextField();
            textField.width = 1000;
            addChild(textField);
            return textField;
        }
    }
}

namespace エイプリルフール

The program’s weak spot is creativity in terms of what it actually does — just some static text output. Pretty pathetic really. All my effort went into the ActionScript. Click here to see the result. It’s probably not worth the effort to try to figure out what it does before running it; that’s not really the fun part. The fun part is trying to figure out why the heck the thing compiles at all; what the individual lines of code actually mean; and what sick features of the language I am taking advantage of. Tell me what you find.