hi,

i was looking to embed some kind of a language in my application. actually, i don't need a full fledged language all i need to do is to eval an expression of the type :
y = x^3 +4*sin(x) + cos(x)^3 - ln(c*x)

i'm writing a graph drawing app. i thought i'd write it myself, but i ended doing some kind of complicated shit, trying to write an entire language and the project got out of hand and so went into the refrigerator.

then i thought i'd embed a language, but it turns out two languages that i know well and are supposed to be used for this kind of thing are horribly complicated to embed - vbscript and python.

vbscript needs com and activex and shit and whatever and i never got beyond the first page on linking C/C++ and python in the python manuals.

so whats the easiest language to embed. preferably something like 5-10 lines of code! :-)

You could try javascript ( http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/ ). It's a bit more than 5-10 lines of code, but it's still quite easy.

Otherwise you could try flex + bison and create your own parser/interpreter.
There is one example in the manual that shows how to evaluate equations (for a calculator). With minor changes you could convert it to what you want to do (probably).

Just develop your own language for interpreting it. I don't think you'll find anything that will embed as easily as in five or ten lines though. or even 50 or 100.

nah, the mozilla JS is "very" easy to embed (about as easy as I think you can get it).

Especially, since most of the mathematical functions are included by default (and the above application probably dosen't need much else)

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

scm_boot (inner_main, argc, argv);

scm_c_define_gsubr ("proc-name", c-proc, req_args, opt args, rest);

scm_c_define ("symbol", value);

Really easy to embed, because it was designed for that.

Unknown_Lamer do you remember Lua ( http://www.lua.org ) the embeddable thing you called "a miserable mix of scheme lisp and something ?". Just thoughts.

Lua looked like BASIC. Vlad was the one that talked about. Hey, you are vlad. I suppose that Lua might be better but I (heart) Scheme and know how to embded Guile quickly.