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From: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: INTERN in Common Lisp and "old" Lisp
Message-ID: <2725F2EA.6996@marob.masa.com>
Date: 24 Oct 90 20:00:41 GMT
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
Lines: 23


How does one do in Common Lisp what INTERN used to do?   The INTERN function
of Common Lisp accepts a string and a package (the current package by
default) and generates a symbol with the specified printname which is
accessible from the specified package.  This is a good and worthy thing
to do.

However, it is not the "traditional" INTERN, which took an "uninterned"
(i.e. package-less) symbol, such as GENSYM generates, and made it
"interned in a package".  In CLtL1 (I don't have CLtL:2) there is a note
that "In MacLisp, INTERN accepted a symbol as well as a string, extracting
the print name of the symbol, but this leads to difficulties about
what to do if there is another symbol with the same print name."

However, there may be occasions when I want to generate a symbol with
GENSYM or MAKE-SYMBOL or what have you, so that the package slot = NIL,
and then set the package slot to the value of some package.  There
does not seem to be any way to do this.  Since we can change a symbol
's package slot >to< NIL using UNINTERN, there should be some way to
undo this (UNUNINTERN?  SET-PACKAGE?  (SETF (PACKAGE #:FOO) "LISP")?)
-- 
cowan@marob.masa.com			(aka ...!hombre!marob!cowan)
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban