play player -- why does this work?

[Devin Asay]

Okay, yesterday was a reality check for me. Since time immemorial, I 
have believed that 'play player "myPlayer"' and 'start player 
"myPlayer"' were synonymous. It may be a relic of using the old HC 
QuickTime external, when you used 'play movie' to start playing an 
external movie file. Regardless of the source, I have happily been 
using play player, and teaching it to my students, since Rev 1.0 
***BECAUSE IT WORKED***. Until this week. One of my students showed me 
a weird problem where his movie would sort of start playing--it would 
show a still frame of the beginning of the movie, plus pop up a text 
track movie that contained the name of the player object in the center 
of the stack window, which then would disappear. I couldn't figure out 
what was causing this, and finally I resorted to the dictionary to 
reread the play command entry, which I had read dozens of times. This 
time it struck me: this command has nothing to do with player objects. 
It is only the start command that pertains to playing movies inside 
players.

I suppose this could all be considered a morality play on the dangers 
of depending on old habits. ;-)

But now the question remains: Why does the play player form even work 
at all? Does it somehow resolve the reference in the player object as a 
virtual imported video file?

Confused,

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University