Rob,

If your talking about using reflection then that would definitely be
the easiest.  However, the security vulnerability you open up could be
huge.  The compiler compiler option is probably the best overall, but
there is a huge learning curve.  And of course you could always whip up
your own evaluator.  Writing your own isn't terribly difficult.  It
consists of 3 basic steps:  First, tokenize the input string.  Then
perform an infix to postfix conversion.  That gets rid of paranthesis
and cumbersome operator precedence rules.  Finally, evaluate by popping
operands of a stack and pushing the result until all operators are
consumed.

Brian

rob schrieb:

There is no "eval" statement there, probably for security reasons.
Also, the JIT compiler expects some IL code as far as I know, not source
code.
You *could* create a little C# program and compile it. Requires Visual
studio on the server (eurgh!!!) Won't work for more than very infrequent
use and creates a huge workload on the server.

You could install perl or tcl on the server. They *do* have
an eval statement. Write a small server that listens on a port,
gets the expression string, evaluates it and returns the result.

But really, an expression parser isn't that hard to do. A simple one
was a (very small) part of my diploma thesis and every CS student
does several during the course of his studies.

Lots of Greetings!
Volker