bug#65516: 30.0.50; Edebug behavior of signaling errors in &or

[Stefan Monnier via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

Michael Heerdegen [2023-08-28 00:58:31] wrote:
> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>> Hmm... actually, looking at `def-form` again it seems it doesn't use
>> `&define` nor `(edebug-)gate`.
> Dunno if this helps, I'm understanding it only half, but AFAIU,
> `def-form` falls back to `edebug-form' which looks at &define and uses
> `edebug-gate' indirectly when calling `edebug-list-form'.

Hmm... Could be, indeed.  In any case, this "gate" business is
quite messy.

I'd be tempted to start removing uses of it, bit by bit, to try and see
what breaks.  And if needed, maybe add a new replacement for it that
would be better defined (I'm imagining a kind of "scoped gate", which
could look like `[&gate-in ... [&gate-lock ...SPECS...] ...]` such
that if `...SPECS...` fails to match, we propagate this failure
immediately up to the `gate-in`).

This way

    [&gate-in [&or ["foo" &gate-lock ...]
                   ["foo" "bar"]]]

would never fallback to ["foo" "bar"] whereas

    [&or [&gate-in ["foo" &gate-lock ...]]
         ["foo" "bar"]]]

would fallback to ["foo" "bar"] if "..." fails to match.


        Stefan