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

[Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>]

Hello,

On Mon 21 Oct 2024 at 10:57am +02, Michael Heerdegen via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" wrote:

> Augusto Stoffel <arstoffel@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I always type `if-let' because it looks cleaner and saves one indentation
>> column (which are purely cosmetic reasons), but also I think it would be
>> weird to have a something* when there's no accompanying something.
>
> Good point, we should decide which names to use.  Personally i prefer
> the names ending with star, because bindings are not parallel as in
> `let'.  But we also already spoke about this.  Dunno which names are
> more popular, it's a matter of taste.

I prefer if-let* for this reason too.  Also:

- it informs a reader that there is no way they are going to see the
  unusual single binding syntax.

- Common Lisp's ubiquitous Alexandria library of basic utilities has an
  if-let which has the unusual single binding syntax.  In fact, that is
  probably where our if-let came from.  So if we are moving away from
  that, it makes sense to use a different name for the thing we
  invented -- if-let*.

-- 
Sean Whitton