I just wanted to be able to extract the information that Gnus write to its ~/.newsrc.eld file. In order to do this I ended up writing a general Lisp reader. It reads textual lisp and returns a perl structure that represents the Lisp objects. For instance ; this is a comment (foo "foo" (+ 42)) Ends up as the following perl structure. [symbol("foo"), "foo", [symbol("+") 42]] Once I had this I just had to produce a Lisp printer, i.e. something that takes structure like the one above and returns the textual lisp representation of it. And then it was just a matter of a little programming to turn on evaluation of these objects and a minimal Lisp environment was born. All code in this package is experimental and the interfaces can change at any time. Copyright 1997 Gisle Aas. <gisle@aas.no>