Gamma allows the programmer to read arbitrary ASCII data using the function read_line, which will read from the current file position to the first carriage return, regardless of the syntactic validity of the data on the line. If data fields are known to be separated by white space, then the read function using Lisp syntax may also be used to read a single field. Notice that the read function will treat an unquoted string of ASCII characters as a symbol, not as a string. It is more common when dealing with line-formatted data to use read_line followed by string_split.