Usage
Lingo is embedded into Adobe Director. Lingo is an object-oriented programming (OOP) language.
There are 3 types of scripts in Lingo:
- behavior scripts are attached to a sprite or inserted into a frame. Sprite behaviors are often used to give control of the sprite's properties and movement. Frame behaviors can be used to create a pause or delay within a certain frame in the score. Behaviors make it easy to program in an object-oriented way, as you can directly see the relationship between the programming and the item they are attached to. They can also control or interact with other sprites, making them a true object.
- movie scripts are not attached to sprites nor can they be instantiated as Objects. They are available throughout the program (movie) and are especially useful for holding global handlers and initializing global variables at the start or end of the movie.
- parent scripts are used to "birth" (create instances of) an Object into a Variable using the "new" command. These objects can control sprites and other media remotely, without being attached to any one sprite, may be used to control data or other non-displayed items, and are useful for recursion routines such as pathfinding. A Parent script can be used to create or destroy an object at anytime, freeing them from the confines of the score that a Behavior is limited to.
Behavior and parent scripts encourage good object-oriented programming. Movie scripts are not as OOP-oriented; however, they can still be used to make "black-box" handlers, where other objects can input raw data and receive answers back, without knowing the inner workings of the box. Using the strengths and ease-of-use of Director's programming methodology, with the advantages of OOP makes for a powerful and fast programming environment.
Lingo supports object inheritance by a slightly idiosyncratic system: a script can have an ancestor property which references another object (usually also a script, although other objects such as cast members can also be ancestors). Properties and methods of the ancestor are inherited by the parent. Behavior scripts are also a kind of ancestor of the sprites to which they are attached, since properties and methods of the behavior can be accessed by reference to the sprite itself. In this case, we have a kind of multiple inheritance, as one sprite may have several behaviors.
Read more about this topic: Lingo (programming Language)
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