A lisp oriented question - interning symbols for use in Maxima

Hi!

I'm writing a Maxima interface to CFFI (for using C libraries from  
Maxima).

I have the following problem - I want to convert a lisp string into a  
symbol representing a Maxima function which would be invoked by the  
same 'string' from Maxima console.

Right now I use

(intern (concatenate 'string "$" string))

to get the symbol which should represent the maxima function.

I get the correct results for cases such as "HelloWorld" -> | 
$HelloWorld| (then the function can be called from maxima with  
'HelloWorld()').

However if I try non-mixed case strings I get an inverted result. So  
a string like "mul2" gives me a symbol |$MUL2|, which from Maxima is  
seen as 'MUL2' and not 'mul2' as I would want it to be.

What should I do to get the correct lisp symbol, so calling from  
Maxima will look like the string I use?

Are there already any functions in Maxima I should use or how should  
I roll my own?


On a side note, is there any interest for a foreign library interface  
in Maxima? Of course it works only in CFFI supported lisps, so no GCL  
support, sorry. I quickly compared the calling overhead by importing  
the C function 'rand()' from 'libc' and compared it to Maxima's  
function 'random' - calling C function from Maxima was faster, so I  
guess the overhead is quite small (on SBCL at least).


Regards,
Ziga