Dear fellow monks,

I'm preparing my first CPAN module, which is a parser and evaluator for mathematical expressions.

I know there are some modules like that no CPAN, but Math::Expr says in section Bugs "The parses does not handle bad strings in a decent way. If you try to parse a string that does not follow the specification above, all strange things might happen..." which scares me. And Math::Expression and Math::Calculus::Expression seem both fine, but they are overkill when I simply want to parse and evaluate numerical expressions.

Anyway, what I am looking for is a good name. Currently I consider Math::Lite::Expression or Math::Eval. Do you have better suggestions, or even better ideas?

Secondly I am looking for advise on the interface.

Currently it looks like this (in examples): 

# does what you think:
print Math::Light::Expression->new("2*3")->val(); 

# force the statement delimiter to be ';'.
# otherwise it's optional, and whitespaces 
# delimit expressions
my $m = Math::Light::Expression->new({force_semicolon => 1});

$m->parse("a = 2; a^(a+b)")->val({ b => 3});

# arguments to val() overwrite variables in statements:
$m->parse("a=1; a*2")->val({ a => -1 }); # result: -2

[download]

Is there anything that could be improved?

(Update: fixed typo)

Update: thank you for your input, everybody.

I named my module Math::Expression::Evaluator now and uploaded it to cpan.

In reply to RFC: Module for evaluation math. expressions by moritz

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