I've done things like that often enough (putting parens around file contents or each line of an ascii file) that I wonder if it would be worth writing a macro that inserted the parens for you on the fly as you read the file before handing it off to the code you want to execute.

I know that was vague, but I just get the feeling I'm often doing something semi-manually in Emacs that my code should be doing for me.

If that is wrong (cheating) - then baby, I don't ever want to be be right !

code as data wins again ! (but with great power, comes great responsibility).