AS3: Can a class add its self?

I am learning AS3 and was wondering can a Class file contain a method to call it self? Kind of like:

function someMethod():void { addChild(this); }

Of course the method is in a package and class. My quick answer to my self is no, but I know I have a lot to learn.

Basically what you’re implicitly saying is this.addChild(this);. That’s quite a paradoxial situation and would lead to an endless recursion So somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that this is not something you might want to do.

You could always just try it out and see what happens, though

Ask yourself this, in a real world scenario, can any container (for example a teacup) contain itself? Highly improbable. The same applies when adding elements to the display list via the addChild() method. I strongly suspect that AS3 will bark at you (ie throw an exception) if you try that.

That would cause an infinite loop and probably your computer would crash, get fire and everybody dies.

In the scene graph each object has a property of a parent and list of children (or just parent if it’s not an object that can contain children). For an object to be it’s own parent would mean that it’s own concatenated transform data (such as it’s concatenatedMatrix) would be used as it’s parent concatenated transform data to combine with it’s local transform data, which would result in it infinitely applying any transform information, such as if you set the x to 10 it’s concatentated x value would be 10 * infinity. Basically, it would go against the idea of what forward kinematics (objects containing each other) is for, and I’d assume that if you attempted it it would throw either a runtime or compiler error saying not to do that.

Edit: looked it up, it’s error #2024, “An object cannot be added as a child of itself.”