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

I think the obvious use is as a shortcut. If you're e.g. initializing an object you simply save typing a lot of "ObjectName." Kind of like lisp's "with-slots" which lets you write

(with-slots (foo bar) objectname
   "some code that accesses foo and bar"

which is the same as writing

"some code that accesses (slot-value objectname 'foo) and (slot-value objectname 'bar)""

It's more obvious why this is a shortcut then when your language allows "Objectname.foo" but still.