On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Chongkai Zhu <<a href="mailto:czhu@cs.utah.edu">czhu@cs.utah.edu</a>> wrote: <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> The idea of gensym is to generate symbol that is not eq? to any other symbol. So I don't know what you are asking here. You can always convert symbol->string, and then compare string, but that's something against the reason to have gensym. Chongkai</blockquote></div> Thanks Filipe and Chongkai for the clarification - I missed the word "uninterned".  I currently use gensym as a hack for keys in a hashtable, hence my need to compare.  But as Filipe says there are other solutions, and I'll look elsewhere. Thanks, yc