[Tutor] 'with foo' was Languages

[dman]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 04:29:09PM -0800, Jeff Shannon wrote:
| > "Sean 'Shaleh' Perry" <shalehperry@attbi.com> wrote:
| >
| > > OK.  I just don't see why you miss them, given it seems
| > > you can do pretty much the same thing without them.
| >
| > when I say 'with foo' it is syntactically obvious what I am doing.  When I
| > assign 'o = my_long_...' it is not.  No big deal.
| 
| I disagree.  The lines following 'with foo' have unqualified names,
| which look to me like local variables rather than object attributes.
| When I see 'o.bar', I know I'm accessing an object, and it's not
| that hard to glance up and see what 'o' has been bound to.

I think this applies equally well to the magic "this" in C++ and Java.
After spending some time in python where instance members and methods
are explicitly qualified, I have more trouble following C++/Java that
relies on the automatic (unqualified) scoping of members.  Now my
C++/Java style is to always use 'this.' (or 'this->' for C++) when
accessing members.

(for those unfamiliar with "this", it is a keyword that serves the
same purpose as the "self" notation in python convention; another
difference is that methods don't declare it as an argument, it
automagically is present)

| Matter of taste and previous experience, I suppose.

Agreed.

-D

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