[julia-users] How do I turn a string into a variable

[Zeta Convex]

I want to be able to write:
    @makevar("life", 42)
which will expand to
   life = 42
How do I do this?

Why do I want to do it? Because it would be cool to have a feature like in 
Octave where I could load an HDF5 file, and it automatically sets the 
variables from the file.