Well you could have knocked me over with a feather….
Here’s a bit of code that I just compiled with the Flex 3.1 SDK:
var person : Person = new Person(); with (person) { name = "Ed"; age = 44; }
Anyone who has done any Visual Basic will instantly recognise this as a standard construct. But it has really been kept quiet in ActionScript 3. It’s certainly not a construct you’d normally associate with any Object Oriented language like ActionScript and its ancestors like JavaScript and C++. It seems to have been kept quiet by the Adobe developers – I couldn’t find anything in the documentation (although to be fair it’s difficult to filter out all the occurrences of “with”), and I couldn’t find any usage of it in the SDK source code.
I found out about this on Vladimir Angelov’s blog here. This lucky guy has managed to kick off his own blog and immediately produce two very informative posts. Well done Vladimir.
