6BIT

[Jon L White <JONL at MIT-MC>]

AI's network is still down, so I've not been able to install anything.

There is this internal function in LAP called 1WD/| which does sort
of what you want, but a little more generally.  I extended 6BIT
to allow for this additional functionality by adding the interface
functions  SYMBOL-TO-SIXBIT  and  SYMBOL-TO-ASCII  which admit &optional
second arguments specifying which 'word' of the converted pname is desired.
For symmetry, I also added SIXBIT-TO-SYMBOL and ASCII-TO-SYMBOL.

I might mention that the conversion from sixbit to ascii for the purpose
of symbolification is an ideal application of LOAD-BYTE and DEPOSIT-BYTE,
and by recoding that inner loop to use them instead of consing up
for implode, the thing runs 75% faster (and does virtually no consing).