Both those would work, though only with a few tweaks. It's one of the features of Lisp in general. There's no difference between an "operator" and a function, in Lisp (all Lisp's not just AutoLisp) everything is a function or a value, and both can be assigned to a symbol.
Or if you quote the "operator", then you need to "de-quote" it when you use it - i.e. use something like apply which takes a quoted symbol of the function instead of just the function. Thus: