[plt-scheme] Re: Novice question: evaluating symbols

I'm saying this from what I know is a low horse :-), but although I've been listening to stern lectures about overuse of eval for decades, and sometimes even giving them myself, I nonetheless find eval really useful in some situations. These include systems in which code is generated and evaluated dynamically (genetic programming systems, weird collaborative live-coding environments), one-off tasks in which I don't care about the overhead and don't want to have to implement a parser or syntax or even a table, and especially one-off tasks involving code that is generated and evaluated dynamically. I probably still overuse it, and I often revise code to eliminate it later, but I'm sure glad it's there.

As a relative newcomer to PLT I was happy to find that most of my eval-ing could be accommodated by adding something like this to my code:

(define-namespace-anchor my-anchor)
(define my-namespace (namespace-anchor->namespace my-anchor))

and then passing my-namespace as a second argument to eval.

For one of our recent projects (a weird collaborative live-coding environment) we also had to use "#lang scheme/load" and we had to fight with it a fair bit, but we got it mostly working.

 -Lee


On Jan 8, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Grant Rettke wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Robby Findler
> <robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
>> Turning symbols into identifiers at runtime is fundamentally an
>> eval-like thing and should be avoided in any well-designed language
>> (to get in my high horse for a moment).
> 
> Are there any good papers or posts on the topic?
> 
> It might be interesting to see a list of the good uses...
> structure-related functions come to mind. Surely there are more?
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--
Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
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lspector at hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
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