StackOverflow.com is my new water cooler.

I had been thinking about writing a small C#-based DSL for a while and was getting hung up on how to express and evaluate expression trees, in particular conditional expressions and predicates. I was aware of the Predicate Builder framework, I have some ANTLR knowledge, so I figured I could write an ANTLR grammar and walk the AST to build a predicate in C#.

My real problem was struggling to find somebody I could talk design with whose eyes wouldn't glaze over after the first 10 seconds.

Cue StackOverflow from stage left.

I posted the question and within 24 hours I'd received two interesting takes on the problem. It appears as though my original plan was probably overbaked and that there was a much simpler solution available.

Code below:

using System;
using System.Linq.Expressions;
using System.Linq.Dynamic;

namespace ExpressionParser
{
    class Program
    {
        public class Person
        {
            public string Name { get; set; }
            public int Age { get; set; }
            public int Weight { get; set; }
            public DateTime FavouriteDay { get; set; }
        }

        static void Main()
        {
            const string exp = @"(Person.Age > 3 AND Person.Weight > 50) OR Person.Age < 3";
            var p = Expression.Parameter(typeof(Person), "Person");
            var e = DynamicExpression.ParseLambda(new[] { p }, null, exp);
            var bob = new Person
                          {
                              Name = "Bob",
                              Age = 30,
                              Weight = 213,
                              FavouriteDay = new DateTime(2000,1,1)
                          };
            var result = e.Compile().DynamicInvoke(bob);
            Console.WriteLine(result);
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

Before StackOverflow I really don't know where this interaction could have taken place.