Runtime evaluation

Demonstrate your language's ability for programs to execute other programs in the language provided at runtime. Show us how you get values in and out (e.g. environments, arguments, return values), and what facilities for restricting (e.g. sandboxes, resource limits) or specializing (e.g. debugging facilities) the execution.

You may not invoke a separate evaluator program, or invoke a compiler and then its output, unless the interface of that program, and the syntax and means of executing it, are considered part of your language/library/platform.

For a more restricted task, see Eval in environment.

Common Lisp

returns 9.

In Common Lisp, programs are represented as trees (s-expressions). Therefore, it is easily possible to construct a program which includes externally specified values, particularly using backquote template syntax:

<lang lisp>(defun add-four-complicated (a-number)

 (eval `(+ 4 ',a-number)))</lang>

Or you can construct a function and then call it. (If the function is used more than once, it would be good to use compile instead of eval, which compiles the code before returning the function. eval is permitted to compile as well, but compile requires it.)

<lang lisp>(defun add-four-by-function (a-number)

 (funcall (eval '(lambda (n) (+ 4 n)))) a-number)</lang>

If your program came from a file or user input, then you have it as a string, and read or read-from-string will convert it to s-expression form: <lang lisp>(eval (read-from-string "(+ 4 5)"))</lang>

Common Lisp has lexical scope, but eval always evaluates “in the null lexical environment”. In particular, it does not inherit the lexical environment from the enclosing code. (Note that eval is an ordinary function and as such does not have access to that environment anyway.)

<lang lisp>(let ((x 1))

 (eval `(+ x 1)))   ; this will fail unless x is a special variable or has a dynamic binding</lang>

Groovy

This program evaluates the Groovy program solution to the "Yuletide Holiday" task: <lang Groovy>new GroovyShell().evaluate def inFormat = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd") def checkFormat = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("EEE")

def result = (2008..2121).findAll {

   Date date = inFormat.parse("${it}-12-25")
   checkFormat.format(date) == "Sun"

}

println result </lang>

Output:

[2011, 2016, 2022, 2033, 2039, 2044, 2050, 2061, 2067, 2072, 2078, 2089, 2095, 2101, 2107, 2112, 2118]

Runtime evaluation

Common Lisp

Groovy

Perl

Smalltalk

Tcl