Link o' the day: Roslyn and eval for C#

Engaging in a journey of adventure and discovery, InfoWorld's Microsoft's Roslyn: Reinventing the compiler as we know it shows that C# developers are on the way to learning that eval in production code is not such a great idea.

So what is Roslyn good for?

The most obvious advantage of this kind of "deconstructed" compiler is that it allows the entire compile-execute process to be invoked from within .Net applications. Hejlsberg demonstrated a C# program that passed a few code snippets to the C# compiler as strings; the compiler returned the resulting IL assembly code as an object, which was then passed to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) for execution. Voilà! With Roslyn, C# gains a dynamic language's ability to generate and invoke code at runtime.

Put that same code into a loop that accepts input from the user, and you've created a fully interactive read-eval-print loop (REPL) console for C#, allowing you to manipulate and experiment with .Net APIs and objects in real time. With the Roslyn technology, C# may still be a compiled language, but it effectively gains all the flexibility and expressiveness that dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby have to offer.

(One of the benefits of the difficulty of doing this sort of thing in C, for example, is that it's so painful that no one who would likely misuse it ever actually does.)