Importing classes into ActionScript files

3
votes

Very basic question here:

Are there any disadvantages to using the ".*" qualifier when stating our imports into ActionScript files.

In other words, is this only a compile-time directive or does this actually affect the footprint and performance of our final builds?

TIA

1
actionscript-3flash-cs5

1 Answers

2
votes

As far as I know, it's just a compiler directive to resolve names. The alternative would be to fully qualify everything everywhere, which quickly becomes a syntactical inconvenience.

I.e. the following two examples should be identical in bytecode:

import foo.bar.*;
var MyClass;

Vs.

import foo.bar.MyClass;
var MyClass;

The difference being of course that the compiler will need additional directives to resolve additional types in the same package, i.e.:

import foo.bar.MyClass;
import foo.bar.MyOtherClass;

var MyClass;
var MyOtherClass;

Vs.

import foo.bar.*;

var MyClass;
var MyOtherClass;