"WITH Considered Dangerous" by Wirth?

Several years ago, I developed a proprietary language based on Modula-2.
A colleague who had developed a commercial Modula-2 compiler told me that
although Pascal and Modula-2 had a WITH statement, WIrth decided at some
point that it was a bad idea and dropped it from his subsequent languages.
Because of this and because of my own reservations about WITH, I did not
include it in the language I was developing. (There's a good chance you
use programs written in it every day. It's used by telephone companies to
implement call-processing applications.)


Did Wirth really decide that the disadvantages of WITH, e.g., creation of
homonyms, outweigh its advantages, e.g. shorthand and inherent
common-subexpression elimination? What Wirth languages do not have a WITH
statement? Oberon?


Paul_Long@ortel.org
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