constructing variable names from strings

[D Peter Siddons]

Is it possible to build a variable name from strings? I'd like to 
batch-process a lot of data. The data is held in directories identified 
by the dataset number, with Octave variable names built (by a C program) 
from the dataset number. I then need to loop through these directories 
to perform more processing, loading the data and saving processed data 
based on the dataset ID. I need to have the variables uniquely 
identified with the dataset because I need to have multiple datasets in 
memory simultaneously.