char-equal of control characters

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

Now that you mention it, this business about CHAR-EQUAL ignoring
differences in the bits attributes looks like a pure mistake to me.  I
don't remember any discussion of this -- it probably just sounded
halfway plausible and slipped by us all at the time.  (Then again, I
might be misremembering.  I've got no easy way to search the archives.)

If we think of the bits attribute as encoding things like control and
meta -- funny shift modifiers that really only make sense in keystrokes
coming in -- I can't think of very many situations in which we would
want to consider #\control-A as being in an equivalence class with #\A.
It certainly is not a situation that parallels the close relationship
between #\A and #\a.

Unless someone thinks of a good reason why CHAR-EQUAL ought to be the
way the manual says it is, maybe we should consider changing CHAR-EQUAL
to take differing bits into account.

The next time we design a new Lisp, we should separate the concept of
characters (which might or might not want to have fonts attached) and
input-keystrokes, which would be some implementation-dependent
representation of anything that might come in from keyboard land,
including combinations of shift bits.  It was a mistake to muddle these
two ideas together, but it is too late to change that now.

-- Scott