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You're looking for (setq *print-case* :downcase), no need to mess with the reader.

(You can put this in ~/.sbclrc or your implementation's equivalent dot file!)

(Tangentially: I've encountered Common Lisp libraries in that wild that actually break if you do this, highly surprising bugs where the author was doing something too-clever with symbols and compared their representation against hard-coded strings, such that changing your *IDE's default print case* had the effect of breaking a very low-level library. This isn't important to anyone else here; I just wanted to vent. I have so much programming pain that only I know about and no one else in the world shares).

CL is case-sensitive, but it handles things so you typically don't have to be aware of it. I don't think I'm smart enough to try to do something clever on top of that, so I hope I can avoid your pain.

> compared their representation against hard-coded strings

Ah, used string= instead of string-equal, did they? Simple mistake to make, not keeping CL being case-insensitive in mind.

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