[Re: [Re: (EQUAL "a" "a") -> ()]]

[KMP at MIT-MC (Kent M. Pitman)]

The only problem about putting strings on another obarray is that it makes
EQ work also. I think this is a poor idea. This will allow people to say
things like (SETQ "(" 3) when they way (SETQ |(| 3) and then later when
someone else does a (PRINC "(") they will get a *big* surprise. Additionally,
(EQ "a" "a") would mean that people might start relying again on EQness of
strings. I find it useful to know for sure that "..." is not really useful
for much more than its printname (unless severely maligned) ... And think
of the great debugging statistics you can get from being able to do 
(DEFUN DEBUGPRINT (X)
 (COND ((SYMBOLP X) (PUSH (STATUS DAYTIME) (GET X 'WHEN-USED-LAST))))
 (PRINT X))
and then knowing for sure that if you did (DEBUGPRINT ".") in many places,
you could tell *which* call to DEBUGPRINT was actually outputting that 
dot where you didn't want it .... This last issue is all in fun, but the
other issues I think are serious. I'd rather not see a string obarray.
-kmp