A perennial problem for Emacs users are the yes/no prompts that require answering “yes” or “no” instead of just “y” or “n”. The usual solution—adopted by almost everyone—is to alias yes-or-no-p to y-or-n-p. Sometime around Emacs 28 or 29 the new variable use-short-answers was introduced as another way of solving the problem.
The last time I wrote about solving the yes-or-no-p problem, I said,
I’ve had my original aliasing code for at least 17 years and see no reason to change it. When use-short-answers was first introduced, I thought I should adopt it but I never did and as far as I can see, it doesn’t make any difference.
That statement was wrong in two ways. First, as related by Bozhidar Batsov, the alias trick doesn’t always work with native compilation because the call to yes-or-no-p may have been compiled before the alias is made. For that reason, use-short-answers is the better solution because it always work.
The second way it was wrong is that when I went to add use-short-answers to my init.el, I discovered that I had already done so, probably back in Emacs 29.