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

Using "with" can make your code more dry.

Consider the following code:

var photo = document.getElementById('photo');
photo.style.position = 'absolute';
photo.style.left = '10px';
photo.style.top = '10px';

You can dry it to the following:

with(document.getElementById('photo').style) {
  position = 'absolute';
  left = '10px';
  top = '10px';
}

I guess it depends whether you have a preference for legibility or expressiveness.

The first example is more legible and probably recommended for most code. But most code is pretty tame anyway. The second one is a bit more obscure but uses the expressive nature of the language to cut down on code size and superfluous variables.

I imagine people who like Java or C# would choose the first way (object.member) and those who prefer Ruby or Python would choose the latter.