Re: Anaphoric macros: increase visibility

[Dmitri Paduchikh]

Michael Heerdegen <address@hidden> wrote:

> Tino Calancha <address@hidden> writes:

>> Hi,
>>
>> I think anaphoric macros are a nice idiom; occasionally
>> they allow to write very concise and clear expressions.
>>
>> AFAICS, in the Emacs tree they are just introduced in ibuf-macs.el
>> (`ibuffer-aif', `ibuffer-awhen').

> We also already have `if-let' and `when-let' in "subr-x".  They are like
> `aif' and `awhen' but you specify "it" explicitly.

This explicitness argument seems to be standard criticism against anaphoric
macros. But it's easy to fix by providing new names for these macros: if-it,
when-it, and so on. Besides being more explicit these names are more readable
than aif and awhen. Comparing if-it, when-it with if-let, when-let, it seems
clear that they represent different tradeoffs of simplicity vs. flexibility.

With best regards
Dmitri Paduchikh