From: M.Ranganathan
Subject: String to atom
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 1994 03:52:22 +0000
Message-ID: <317a1m$dun@tove.cs.umd.edu>

Nick Koudas and I thank you for all your replies. read-from-string
does what we want. In case you were wonering....We are recovering	
C hacckers co-operating on a  Natural Language Processing project.

Ranga.

From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: String to atom
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 1994 11:20:49 +0000
Message-ID: <TFB.94Jul28122050@boyd.cogsci.ed.ac.uk>

* M Ranganathan wrote:
> Nick Koudas and I thank you for all your replies. read-from-string
> does what we want. In case you were wonering....We are recovering	
> C hacckers co-operating on a  Natural Language Processing project.

Using READ-FROM-STRING to get symbols from strings is a fine example
of the sort of thing that gets lisp a bad name.  It's error-prone
(consider "(foo"), even if it works it can return an arbitrary type
instead of a symbol, and it requires you to have READ and everything
it might call in your image.

What you want is INTERN and possibly STRING-UPCASE if you care about
case:  (intern (string-upcase "(foo")) -> |(FOO|.

--tim