Syntax trees from strings

[Søren Hauberg]

Hi All

I just had a very interesting chat with a researcher doing machine learning in 
collaboration with Coursera, trying to build large scale grading systems. They 
are working on tools for grading the quality of a code submission by students 
(i.e. a student submit a piece of code as an answer to an exercise, and now 
they want to grade that piece of code).

As they use Octave as their main teaching language they also hook into the 
Octave code to build these grading systems. In particular they use the Octave 
parser to generate syntax trees. Right now they get the code submission through 
a database, then they write the code to a file and run the parser on that file. 
He was curious if there are ways of to avoid writing the code to a file in 
order to parse it. Do we have such functions?

Thanks
Søren