readtable-case

[doner@aero.org (John Doner)]

I had some code written for Allegro that took advantage of
case-sensitivity, e.g., defining a function "Equal" different
from the CL function named "EQUAL."  Everything in the file is
in lower-case except such new function names.  I thought to
do (setf (readtable-case *readtable*) :invert), which by the
book would cause symbols typed in lower-case to get converted
to upper-case, but symbols typed with mixed case to be left
alone.  For awhile, that worked, but eventually I got it into
a state wherein an all lower-case input was translated to all
upper-case except the first letter.  The backtrace might show
it had read some input (defmacro something ... ) as
(dEFMACRO sOMETHING ...), and was complaining that sOMETHING was
unbound.  O.k., there's no doubt I'm getting it screwed up
somehow.  But my reading of CLTL2 doesn't show me a way to
produce this behavior at all.  Any ideas?

John Doner