Eval

Eval

In some programming languages, eval , short for the English evaluate, is a function which evaluates a string as though it were an expression and returns a result; in others, it executes multiple lines of code as though they had been included instead of the line including the eval. The input to eval is not necessarily a string; it may be structured representation of code, such as an abstract syntax tree (like Lisp forms), or of special type such as code (as in Python). The analog for a statement is exec, which executes a string (or code in other format) as if it were a statement; in some languages, such as Python, both are present, while in other languages only one of either eval or exec is. Eval and apply are instances of meta-circular evaluators, interpreters of a language that can be invoked within the language itself.

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