+;;; FIXME: maybe not the best place
+;;;
+;;; FIXME: think of a better name -- not only does this not have the
+;;; CAR recursion of EQUAL, it also doesn't have the special treatment
+;;; of pathnames, bit-vectors and strings.
+;;;
+;;; KLUDGE: This means that we will no longer cache specifiers of the
+;;; form '(INTEGER (0) 4). This is probably not a disaster.
+;;;
+;;; A helper function for the type system, which is the main user of
+;;; these caches: we must be more conservative than EQUAL for some of
+;;; our equality tests, because MEMBER and friends refer to EQLity.
+;;; So:
+(defun equal-but-no-car-recursion (x y)
+ (cond
+ ((eql x y) t)
+ ((consp x)
+ (and (consp y)
+ (eql (car x) (car y))
+ (equal-but-no-car-recursion (cdr x) (cdr y))))
+ (t nil)))