You should use uint ONLY for doing bitwide operations like RGB values and stuff. For anything else, int/Number are more appropriate.

“In real life, you *should* be using INT if you expect your value to become negative, or use UINT”

… What? I should use INT, or use UINT? I was, that was the problem.

Anyhow, for all projects I now use Number instead of uint or int. Check out this link, originally posted in the article mentioned in the comments from Keith Peters:
http://kuwamoto.org/2006/06/15/avoid-ints-in-actionscript/

You *cannot* for a if( UINT = 0…

In real life, you *should* be using INT if you expect your value to become negative, or use UINT

In this case the index does NOT remain positive, or rather shouldn’t, so uint is not appropriate. In a positive moving index, as in my first example, the index never becomes negative so it’s fine. The problem was when the index moved in the negative direction.

I tend to think of while loops as more dangeous, since you are responible for the exit condition. The while loop has its place, but in this case it’s of no advantage. In fact you’d end up with the same scenario if you were keeping track of the index.

This is my prefered way of doing it:

while ( list.length > 0 ) {
list.pop();
}

Much more readable and more safe than the backwards for-loop.

Good warning though.