If you don't read the forums

[Colin Holgate]

I’ll have to work out my forum login, it’s not working right now. But on the topic in question, here are a couple of examples from the history of Flash, that might help:

When Flash 9 came out Adobe introduced ActionScript 3. It was radically different than ActionScript 2, and some of the ways you could work in AS2 were no longer supported. But, you could still choose to make an AS2 document if you wanted. That ability was supported for at least three major versions before it was dropped. People have mostly coped, and keep a copy of CS6 around just in case.

Even within AS3 documents there were file differences from version to version, and Flash would support two version back, you could do a Save As to the two previous versions.

Starting with CS5.5 they made the file format future proof. You will be able to take a Flash Professional Creative Cloud 2025 document and open it in CS5.5. Any new features you had used wouldn’t work, but at least you could get at the media, and if you hadn’t used newer features, you could do a Save As to get an authentic CS5.5 document.

Back to LiveCode, it could do something similar, but better. From now on you would choose LiveCode Legacy, or LiveCode, as the stack type, and unlike Flash keep that ability around forever. Also, make it be that LiveCode 8.0 file format is future proof, and that it could open a LiveCode 10 document, to at least use the LiveCode 8 features in that stack.