What was Adobe thinking? Not even Java requires jumping through this many hoops!
A pity, because ActionScript 2.0 was actually quite a nice language.

I experimented with it a bit for the new site I was developing for my music. I waded through all of the tedious conversions, getting rid of things like SetInterval in favor of the Timer class, loading movies using the Loader class instead of a direct method, finding lots of things taken out, lots of names changed, but basically the same capabilities packaged in a more structured yet klutzier form.

Then I tried to unload a movieclip.

You can’t do it. Flash WILL NOT LET GO of the object, even after you call one of the removeChild methods. And since the object in question is an ActionScript 2 music player and (surprise surprise) you can’t interoperate with ActionScript 2 movies, I’m stuck in a situation where I can’t change the file that is playing and I can’t remove and reload the component.

Alone, this is a bad issue, but after hours of struggling with the language’s weird idiosyncrasies, I’m ready to go back to AS2 and forget about learning AS3 until some of the issues are fixed.

Update: I finally solved this problem using LocalConnection. Yes, I needed to use what is essentially a light form of IPC to solve this problem.