The latest version of ASDF contains three functions: SYSTEM-DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON SYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON and SYSTEM-WEAKLY-DEPENDS-ON that return information about defined systems. The intention is to support introspection about sets of systems (I believe Quicklisp does this today). Currently, ASDF does *not* put the return values into canonical form. So, equivalent forms like :depends-on (foo) and :depends-on ("foo") will yield different return values. Similarly, :version specifications will not be resolved. This seems wrong to me. I feel that the return values should be canonicalized. So all system names should be resolved down to lower-cased strings. Does that sound like the right approach? It would support performing inference on the systems relatively straightforwardly. I can't imagine why people would want the exact, literal slot initforms, but I could be wrong. R