Weirdness reading integers from strings

[cornell@unix1.cs.umass.edu (Matthew Cornell)]

I've discovered what I think is a bug in READ-FROM-STRING and
PARSE-INTEGER. I've included a transcript below. I'm trying to read a
negative integer embedded in a string. When I read from the string's
subsequence I get a symbol; when I read from an immedate (i.e. not
from a subsequence) I get my desired and expected result: a fixnum. I
realize "-200" could be parsed as either a symbol or a fixnum but why
the different behavior for subseqs? I also tried using PARSE-INTEGER
but it errors on "-200". I'm using mcl 2.0b1p3.

matt


? (setf str (subseq "noHardwareErr                   -200       Required sound hardware not available"
          32 36))
"-200"
? (read-from-string str)
\-200
4
? (type-of *)
SYMBOL
? (read-from-string "-200")
-200
4
? (type-of *)
FIXNUM
? (parse-integer str)
> Error: Not an integer string: "-200".
> While executing: PARSE-INTEGER
> Type Command-. to abort.
See the Restarts	 menu item for further choices.
1 > 
Aborted
? (parse-integer "-200")
-200
4
?