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A character is sometimes represented merely by its code, and sometimes
by another integer value which is composed from the code and all
implementation-defined attributes
(in an implementation-defined way
that might vary between Lisp images even in the same implementation).
This integer, returned by the function char-int, is called the
character's “encoding.”
There is no corresponding function
from a character's encoding back to the character,
since its primary intended uses include things like hashing where an inverse operation
is not really called for.