ActionScript vs. Java vs. Scala vs. ZenScript Comparison Chart

The ActionScript® scripting language lets you add complex interactivity, playback control, and data display to your application. You can add ActionScript in the authoring environment by using the Actions panel, Script window, or an external editor. ActionScript follows its own rules of syntax, and reserved keywords, and lets you use variables to store and retrieve information. ActionScript includes a large library of built‑in classes that let you create objects to perform many useful tasks. You do not have to understand every ActionScript element to begin scripting. If you have a clear goal, you can start building scripts with simple actions. ActionScript and JavaScript are both rooted in the ECMA-262 standard, the international standard for the ECMAScript scripting language. For this reason, developers who are familiar with JavaScript can find ActionScript immediately familiar. Animate includes more than one version of ActionScript to meet the needs of different kinds of developers.

Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language. Scala's static types help avoid bugs in complex applications, and its JVM and JavaScript runtimes let you build high-performance systems with easy access to huge ecosystems of libraries. The Scala compiler is smart about static types. Most of the time, you need not tell it the types of your variables. Instead, its powerful type inference will figure them out for you. In Scala, case classes are used to represent structural data types. They implicitly equip the class with meaningful toString, equals and hashCode methods, as well as the ability to be deconstructed with pattern matching. In Scala, functions are values, and can be defined as anonymous functions with a concise syntax.