Perhaps I'm ruining some didactic exercise here, but if you're using
eval on something you don't want eval'd until the function is run, you
should backquote it. This works for me:


(defun functionmaker (name form)
 (eval
  `(defun ,name ()
     ,form)))

I used to associate backquoting exclusively with macros, but I think
that was wrong thinking.

Hope someone will correct me if I've done something dumb here…