Sorry if this sounds stupid, but how is Javascript becoming ActionScript? To name a few major differences: the OO architectures are very different and Javascript doesn't compile.
Might be more accurate to say that Javascript was becoming ActionScript - ActionScript 3 was based on a draft standard for EcmaScript 4, which at the time of AS3's creation looked set to become JavaScript 2.0, but that didn't end up panning out.
It's my understanding that Adobe has every intention of remaining a superset of EcmaScript. If ES breaks AS3 compatibility in the future, it's safe to expect that Adobe will keep pace.
FWIW, for much of its documentation, Adobe refers to the EcmaScript specification. In fact, Flash instructions map 1:1 to EcmaScript specs, including the type conversion and promotion algorithms.
ActionScript is a superset of JavaScript with syntactic sugar. All the "differences", mostly type annotations, class-based oop, and traits, are superficial and do not modify the language to any reasonable degree. Every ECMAScript program is also a valid ActionScript 3 program.
What do you mean "javascript doesn't compile"? if you mean it doesn't have a native ahead-of-time compiler for an existing physical processor, well, that's not a language problem but a community/effort problem :-)
I agree with you in general about the similarities between the two languages, but I haven't seen any movement from one to the other regarding the differences. I simply meant to address your comment regarding JS becoming AS.
Re: compilation...sorry..that's exactly what I meant :-]. As far as I know, you can't open a prompt in a Flash app and code AS on the fly like you can in Javascript. I don't consider this a problem...I actually prefer JS to AS.
