Are there legitimate uses for JavaScript's “with” statement?

Question

Alan Storm\'s comments in response to my answer regarding the with statement got me thinking. I\'ve seldom found a reason to use this particular language feature, and had ne

Answer 1

Having experience with Delphi, I would say that using with should be a last-resort size optimization, possibly performed by some kind of javascript minimizer algorithm with access to static code analysis to verify its safety.

The scoping problems you can get into with liberal use of the with statement can be a royal pain in the a** and I wouldn't want anyone to experience a debugging session to figure out what the he.. is going on in your code, only to find out that it captured an object member or the wrong local variable, instead of your global or outer scope variable which you intended.

The VB with statement is better, in that it needs the dots to disambiguate the scoping, but the Delphi with statement is a loaded gun with a hairtrigger, and it looks to me as though the javascript one is similar enough to warrant the same warning.