Hrvoje Niksic writes: I *think* this is a bad idea... intern-soft should return nil if the given string does not correspond to the name of an interned symbol. Using a symbol argument has the side effect of interning the symbol if it does not exist, which means that intern-soft will *never* return nil when passed a symbol. Example: evaluate the following three forms in the *scratch* buffer: (intern-soft "foo2") nil (intern-soft 'foo2) ;;; causes an error (intern-soft "foo2") foo2 //Raymond. -- Raymond Wiker, Orion Systems AS +47 370 61150