simplifying cond*

simplifying cond*

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

In writing text about cond* for the ELisp Reference Manual, I realized that
I can simplify its usage conventions with no change in the code.
Only the doc-string will change.

The change would document that all non-exit clauses are one-element clauses
and all one-element clauses are non-exit clauses.  That would be true,
for all the clauses that will remain documented as acceptable
after this change.

The doc string would recommend

   ((progn BODY...))

instead of

   (t BODY...)

and

   ((when COND BODY...))

instead of

   (COND BODY... :non-exit)

WDYT?

Eli, I would like to put this change into version 30.
It can't break anything.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: simplifying cond*

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2024 23:00:35 -0500
> 
> In writing text about cond* for the ELisp Reference Manual, I realized that
> I can simplify its usage conventions with no change in the code.
> Only the doc-string will change.
> 
> The change would document that all non-exit clauses are one-element clauses
> and all one-element clauses are non-exit clauses.  That would be true,
> for all the clauses that will remain documented as acceptable
> after this change.
> 
> The doc string would recommend
> 
>    ((progn BODY...))
> 
> instead of
> 
>    (t BODY...)
> 
> and
> 
>    ((when COND BODY...))
> 
> instead of
> 
>    (COND BODY... :non-exit)
> 
> WDYT?
> 
> Eli, I would like to put this change into version 30.
> It can't break anything.

Documentation changes are always okay on the release branch.  However,
in this case, cond* is not in Emacs 30, only in Emacs 31.  So you can
install any changes for it on the master branch without limitations,
but there's no cond* documentation to fix on the emacs-30 release
branch.