Question

In Flex 3,

var anInstance : MyClass = new MyClass(); with (anInstance) {     property1 = 'fred';     property2 = 5;     propert3 = 7; } 

does NOT flag ‘propert’ as a non-existent property name. I thought this was a remainder of the evil JavaScript object behavior (referring to a property name of an object implicitly creates it), but it seems to be a side-effect of the ‘with’.

This makes me very sad as the ‘with’ was a little reminder of Delphi (except it works correctly there).

Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

From reading the documentation:

Actionscript apparently bubbles out for scope resolution on embedded variables (not surprising, since the syntax doesn’t require an explicit dereference symbol like ‘.’ or ‘->’ to indicate which variable names should be ‘withed’.) So you effectively are creating a variable at global scope named propert3.

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EDIT after thinking about why this ‘problem’ exists –

Javascript is the epitome of non-strict typing. And Actionscript, being a strict superset of Javascript, can’t enforce strict typing except as declared by its own extensions to the language – which means it must support untyped variables.