programming is hard

setTimeout is a useful built-in Javascript function, not available for Flash MX and under. It waits for a number of milliseconds and then runs a specified function. Here is a snippet that defines setTimeout in Flash MX.

_global.setTimeout = function(a,b,c, args){
    // for a basic function call:
    if (typeof arguments[0] == "function"){
        args = arguments.slice(2);
        var ID, func = function(){
            a.apply(null, args);
            clearInterval(ID);
        }
        ID = setInterval(func, b, args);
        
    // for an object method call:
    }else{
        args = arguments.slice(3);
        var ID, func = function(){
            a[b].apply(a, args);
            clearInterval(ID);
        }
        ID = setInterval(func, c, args);
    }
    return ID;
}
_global.clearTimeout = clearInterval;

This snippet was originally taken from http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showpost.php3?p=116265&postcount=3. Thank you very much to senocular, who provided the code.