Re: symbold and packages

 >=Fabrizio Morbini
 > ...I have a function that adds "a" or "an" before a word...

OK, you are basically doing string processing, so symbols aren't really the 
right data type any more than numeric ASCII codes would be.  You ought to 
either do everything with strings in the first place
   (defparameter *test* '("p" "q" "r"))
or, if you must deal with symbols, employ something to "coerce" them to 
strings (as was done implicitly with #'string-equal in my last reply).