ES3.1 Draft: 11 June 2008 version available

[Brendan Eich]

On Jun 13, 2008, at 10:11 AM, Mark S. Miller wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 9:45 AM, Sam Ruby <rubys at apache.org> wrote:
>>> p69 12.10.  Disallowing the with statement in strict mode breaks the
>>> ES3.1 - ES4 subset relationship (we've found no compelling reason to
>>> ban it).
>
>
> Regarding whether there's a compelling reason to ban "with", what
> about the issue that "with" is an insanely confusing construct?

The horse has left the barn.


> On the spreadsheet, how much red was accumulated on "strict with"?

"Reformed with" was an attempt to restore lexical scope by exact type  
annotation. That's what people voted down, not the ES1-3 "with"  
statement.


> IIRC, it was a lot. Does anyone think "with" is a valuable construct?
> Why? Anyone care to post a defense of "with"?

There's no point tilting at windmills. "with" is absolutely required  
for web compatibility, and it won't go away for a long, long time --  
if ever. It's insanely popular. It's not only common in extant or  
"legacy" JS, new uses crop up all the time.

You might hope to cause "with" to go away by forbidding it in a new,  
optional ES3.1 mode, but the chances of that seem at least as small  
as the chances that "with" popularity will simply make people avoid  
such a strict mode.

/be