Conversion of strings to expressions

Hello,

I'm not sure how to state my question in a technically accurate
manner, so 
I'll use a short example to clarify my problem:

Say I have a vector,

vec<-c(1,2,3,2)

I would like to be able to "reference" the vector by using the string

containing the name of the vector - that is, I would like to know of
some 
function which is able to convert the string "vec" into the vector
vec itself. 
The purpose of this is to be able to do something like

somefunc("vec")==2

[1] FALSE TRUE FALSE TRUE

I hope it is clear from this what the problem is. It seems to me that
the 
function desired is akin to a sort of "inverse" to the quote()
function, but I 
have been unable to find such a function.

I am using R 1.9.1 on Windows 2000 SP4. Does anyone have a suggestion
of how 
to solve the problem?

Thanks,
 Alexander