bug#73853: 31.0.50; and-let* is useless

[Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>]

Hello,

On Fri 18 Oct 2024 at 04:11am +02, Michael Heerdegen via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" wrote:

> `and-let*'s purpose is to express conditions, `when-let*'s is
> conditional evaluation.  We have `and-let*' and `when-let*' for the
> same reason we have `and' and `when'.  See prior discussions.

Right.  The Lisp convention of using `when' for pure control flow and
`and' for returning values is a good aid to readability.

If we don't have and-let*, then we can't use this convention in the case
that we also want to bind variables.

So, I am very keen for and-let* to remain.

>> [ I think we have too many (if|when|and)-let(*) for our own good: we
>>   should pick some winners and deprecate the other ones.   ]
>
> AFAIR the non-star versions exist for backward compatibility only - so
> I would rather get rid of these.  Parallel existence of these non-star
> vs. star versions should be a temporary state, it complicates the
> matter for an epsilon gain.

Yes.  I would like us to move forward with removing the non-star ones.

I believe there was a previous attempt to deprecate them but it had to
be backed out.  But maybe now is the time to try again.

-- 
Sean Whitton