On: I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig

[mkl]

Sure, but for most purposes, that kind of generality is just not needed. I have hundreds of useful small to large programs that don't need any external input - it's all in the source code.

Besides, even if you want to take in a general function in this case, there's almost certainly no need to write a bespoke parser by hand. In fact, this student was able to handle that requirement just fine (he had this in there first, and we made the program more useful by taking it out):

  exec('f = lambda x: ' + input('Enter function: f(x) = '))

Writing parsers is simply not the universal programming requirement you claim.

This will be my last reply in this thread.