User defined math expression using values from objects... or something like that

Question

Dear forum readers/writers I am looking for some ideas/suggestions/thoughts on the following: i am creating a tool that does a whole bunch of structural analysis. It reads data from a retail analysis software package and postprocesses that. I read in that data and store it in an object. Later in the process i use the data. The issue that that i want to let the user define what objects to use to build an expression. So let's say I have an object X containing data: A B C D E and F (all doubles). I would like the user to be able to define an expression in a form something like sqrt(A^2 + B^2) + 2*F. basically a custum expression builder using values of objects.... any ideas?

Vulpes · Answer

Rather than try to build your own expression evaluator I'd look at something such as NCalc ( http://ncalc.codeplex.com/ ). I'm not sure whether this can handle variables directly but if it can't you can simply replace the variables with their values before calling Evaluate().