Richard> It seems to me that the disadvantage of true strings is
Richard> that they look like atoms... e.g. (atom "abc") is t.
Richard> but they can't have property lists and can't be assigned
Richard> values.
I was actually worried that using lisp strings to represent maxima
strings would break some current usage, eg (eq '&abc '&abc) is t,
(eq "abc" "abc") is nil.
Richard> The advantage of strings has to do with memory savings
Richard> in not producing symbol structure. Anything else?
To me, the advantage of using strings is that any modern programmer that
sees the '&abc hack will say yuck.
Ole