[Lazarus] 'with' is evil, isn't it?

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Sven Barth schrieb:

>> you can see the following example
>>
>>      with new_patient: new, old_patient: old do begin
>>        new.LastName := 'Smith';
[...]

> Not only the ":" look a bit strange (it remembers me a bit of the 
> on-clause in except blocks though), but also - and more importantly - 
> the order: first the variable or expression that is to be "shortened" 
> and then the new identifier for it.

This IMO is due to LL(1), where optional parts deserve a characteristic 
prefix, which can be combined easily with a separator token. Above 
snippet would read much more strange as e.g.

       with :new new_patient, :old old_patient do begin

It might look clearer as

       with new_patient as new, old_patient as old do begin

but most probably the "as" was not already a recognized token in that 
language.

DoDi