A couple of decades ago, I remember using the with statement in Pascal. I
have since wished for it in several languages, but I guess in Julia, it
would probably be feasible without altering the language?
Basically, it'd be something like
type Foo
a
end
foo = Foo(42)
@with foo do
a = 1
b = "frozzbozz"
# ...
end
# foo.a is now 1
That is, let the fields of a composite type be available (syntactically) as
local variables.
Now, hacking together something like this wouldn't be hard – but making it
really work (without weirdness or performance degradation) seems harder.
And maybe it's a bad idea to begin with. Or maybe someone has already done
it?-)
