"eval" in Scala

it's now 2011, and you can do so with scala.tools.nsc.Interpreter

see http://blog.darevay.com/2009/01/remedial-scala-interpreting-scala-from-scala/

Scala is not a scripting language. It may look somewhat like a scripting language, and people may advocate it for that purpose, but it doesn't really fit well within the JSR 223 scripting framework (which is oriented toward dynamically typed languages). To answer your original question, Scala does not have an eval function just like Java does not have an eval. Such a function wouldn't really make sense for either of these languages given their intrinsically static nature.

My advice: rethink your code so that you don't need eval (you rarely do, even in languages which have it, like Ruby). Alternatively, maybe you don't want to be using Scala at all for this part of your application. If you really need eval, try using JRuby. JRuby, Scala and Java mesh very nicely together. It's quite easy to have part of your system in Java, part in Scala and another part (the bit which requires eval) in Ruby.

Scala has added official support to JSR-223 in 2.11 (https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-874).

So if you still need it after thinking about the considerations made in the currently accepted answer from Daniel Spiewak (about rethinking in a way it is not needed), this should be the official alternative.