Re: C-h b uses non-standard key descriptions

[Richard Stallman]

    Press C-h b in the scratch buffer and try to find the binding for M-f
    in the list.  It is not there.  It is only present as
    ESC f

This is a relic of a decision made at the beginning of the history of
GNU Emacs.  ESC f and M-f are supposed to be equivalent.  The way
Emacs implements this is by converting M-f into ESC f internally.  The
bindings for meta characters are actually stored in the ESC prefix
definition.

This is not very clean, and I would be happy in principle if we
changed it around, so that the real bindings are for meta characters
directly, and ESC followed by another character were converted somehow
into a single meta character.