No. Computers were pretty scarce in highschool and programming courses were non-existant.

...writing an expression evaluator is boring...

I am sure doing anything you already know how to do can be boring. If you have had the benefit of a college education in computer science and/or work as a programmer professionally, building a precedence parser this trivial is probably extremely boring.

I like string eval.

I agree and use it when it makes sense to. OTOH, when people post neat puzzles like this I take it as an opportunity to learn things I don't already know. Since it isn't production code - there is no harm in a little golf, obfu, or non-straight forward solutions. I often intentionally limit the tools I will allow myself to use - see Necessity is the mother of invention for an explanation of why.

Again, thanks for the puzzle.