You Should Rarely Need eval(parse())

Many programming languages have a function to evaluate a string as code or an expression, e.g., eval() in R. Once you learn it, it becomes tempting to abuse it. Instead of writing code naturally and directly, you start to think about writing code that constructs code to be evaluated. For example, instead of writing 1 + 1, you may write a monster like this:

eval(parse(text = paste(c(‘1’, ‘1’), collapse = ‘+’)))

This is obviously just a silly example, but I have seen people abuse eval() in R many …