On 14 Jul 2008, at 10:25, Paul Smith wrote:

> Is it awful at this point to say that I just don't get it?  How does  
> eval on
> these curious looking strings end up giving you an interger?

Well you've got multiplication, exponentiation and substraction/unary  
minus (ie you've got addition) and parentheses. So they only thing  
missing is getting some actual numbers to multiply together and so on.
Try evaluating ??, ?-, ?* etc... in the console :-)

Fred