What you should do if you are not referencing an object on stage (like a movie clip, button or text field) is to give it a data type. ie. var myArray:Array = new Array();
This will also allow for code hinting in both the actions panel and in external tools like FlashDevelop.

Back when I first started C/C++ I was using EDIT - yes the evil dos editor - and after a short time got into Visual Studio and it’s lovely intellisense (code hinting) and couldn’t look back.

Now about 4 years on, even with new languages I don’t use hinting any more and even find it annoying; It’s great when you’re getting used to a language during the initial stages but I always feel that the actual documentation plays a much better role than trying to guess which function does what and then trying to read through the arguments of that function — Go find the documentation and some examples and you’ll learn a lot more.

Given, if you’re just lazy and can’t remember function names or argument layout it’s always nice to have a little help but thankfully I seem to remember most of this stuff to the point that I don’t even think about code hinting any more.

Most of the open source alternatives (eclipse included) don’t seem to feel as nice as the one in Visual Studio so maybe they’re just not good enough; I did notice VS now pulls in adjacent comments from functions and classes to give you even more detail about the item which seems to help a lot more.

Second issue that annoys me about the built in editor for flash is what you post above; Why should I name my variables in such a way to help the editor? The editor should just be smart enough to figure it out - reminds me of the good ol’ vb days of ‘btnOkay’ and ‘lblName’, heh. I hated that. :-p

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/UsingFlash/help.html?content=WS3e7c64e37a1d85e1e229110db38dec34-7f9f.html
ActionsPanel.xml contains code hinting preferances