Daniel R.

I didn't find this well documented when I was looking it up so I thought I'd post a sample. While Actionscript 3 (AS3) doesn't support protected and private classes like Java does, you can have helper classes that are only visible within the file that they are defined. The syntax for them is a little weird but the Flex 2 Beta 2 compiler seems to like it. The syntax is that after the package you define the helper class:

package com.example {
     public class Sample {
          private var _helperClass:HelperClass = new HelperClass();
     }
}
// imports for the helper class go here
import com.example.xml.SaxHandler;
class HelperClass {
     private var _saxHandler:SaxHandler;
}