João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:

> This is a feature of Lisp in general and the correct way to go from
> strings to symbols.

Great, thanks to confirm.

> Curiously, I was pleasantly surprised that much code of key symbol
> processing facilities was already using this indirection and
> shorthands automatically worked in those facilities because of that.

`substitute-command-keys` at least doesn't handle this.

Say you have the file foo.el with 
`read-symbol-shorthands` == (("f-" . "foo-")) and containing definitions
like `f-dothis`, `f-dothat` etc... and a var `f-help-string` containing string like
"\<f-map>\[f-dothis]: Description", if you define a function `f-help`
containing (substitute-command-keys f-help-string) it will fail
complaining `f-dothis` is void.

-- 
Thierry