Subj : Re: [Spider-Monkey] JSOPTION_STRICT and "with"
To   : Brian Barnes
From : Brendan Eich
Date : Sat Jun 26 2004 02:40 pm

Brian Barnes wrote:
> A couple people have been bugging me about using "with".  I normally had 
> the compiler set on JSOPTION_STRICT, which restricts this.  I turned 
> that off (benefits are out-weighing risks).

Can you say more about that?  What particular strict warning was crying 
wolf for you?

> Is "with" not part of the spec?  Can I expect it to disappear in some 
> later revision, or is there some other reason?

Any backward-compatible ECMA-262 next Edition will keep it, but might 
deprecate it -- perhaps even make it work only in backward-compatible 
mode.  See http://www.mozilla.org/js/language/js20/

> One again, just curious as to some of these inner-workings :)

You may have noticed that 'with (o) print(x)' works both if o.x is 
bound, and if x is bound in the scope chain that encloses the with 
statement.  That makes for certain kinds of errors, at run-time.

/be

.