From: Daniel Nesmith
Subject: Re: How to get an alphabet from an atom?
Date: 
Message-ID: <1nd4s7INNjk2@sbusol.rz.uni-sb.de>
In article <··············@ponder>, Jesse writes:
|> Hi,
|>   Sometimes it is useful to be able to analyse an atom as a list of its 
|> characters. But how to do this? I know there is a function 'explode' that
|> can transfer an atom to a list. But some lisp intepreter doesn't support
|> this function.  Is there any way to enforce 'explode' in gclisp?

If you want to do this for arbitrary atoms, you can define 'explode' as:

(defun explode (x)
 (coerce (princ-to-string x) 'list))

Of course, this actually works for anything that you can princ.

If you just wanted this for symbols, you could substitute 'symbol-name' for
'princ-to-string'.

Dan