Apropos case sensitive?

[edsel!bhopal!jonl@labrea.stanford.edu (Jon L White)]

[Note: LUCIDites are now using another mail gateway: typical address is:
       edsel!jonl@labrea.stanford.edu]

Our reasoning here at Lucid was similar to what you came up with -- namely
that the language of CLtL, p. 443, very strongly implied the same semantics
of macthing as the default for SEARCH, which is an EQL, rather than an
EQUALP, test.  

Many of us also felt the need so strongly for a case-insensitive apropos 
that Lucid Common Lisp actually has two such functions hidden inside it:
    lucid::case-insensitive-apropos
    lucid::case-insensitive-apropos-list
but they will probably be "shaken" out in the delivered 2.1 beta images.  

I feel that this issue should be presented to the "cleanup" sub-committee
of the X3J13 standards committee.  Perhaps SEF can prod Steve Handerson 
into writing up a proposal to them?  Lucid might feel impelled to "expose"
this hidden function if the committe were inclined towards the proposal.

By the way, there are some other issues about apropos that might need 
"cleaning up", some of which were discussed on this list a couple of 
years ago (for "couple" mabye equal to one).  For example, the 
documentation uses the term "available symbols", but in at least one 
instance, it ought to use "accessible symbols", for conformity to 
chapter 11 on packages.  Also, the scope of do-all-symbols has been 
questioned by some; there have been at least two proposals on it:

  (1) to add a new "function" called, say do-most-symbols, that excluded
      certain packages

  (2) to add a global variable (or a special variable) called, say,
      *all-symbols-exclusions* which is a list of packages which the
      several "all-symbols" functions would skip [e.g., do-all-symbols,
      find-all-symbols, apropos, case-insensitive-apropos, etc]


-- JonL --