Why exactly is eval evil?

Posted by Jay on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jay
Published on 2010-04-03T13:50:56Z Indexed on 2010/04/03 13:53 UTC
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I know that Lisp and Scheme programmers usually say that eval should be avoided unless strictly necessary. I´ve seen the same recommendation for several programming languages, but I´ve not yet seen a list of clear arguments against the use of eval. Where can I find an account of the potential problems of using eval?

For example, I know the problems of GOTO in procedural programming (makes programs unreadable and hard to maintain, makes security problems hard to find, etc), but I´ve never seen the arguments against eval.

Interestingly, the same arguments against GOTO should be valid against continuations, but I see that Shemers, for example, won´t say that continuations are "evil" -- you should just be careful when using them. They´re much more likely to frown upon code using eval than upon code using continuations (as far as I can see -- I could be wrong).

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