A while back, I wrote a simple calculator in Ruby. A few minutes ago I ran into a similar question in Stackoverflow, and decided to implement the Python version:

def is_number(s):
    try:
        float(s)
        return True
    except ValueError:
        return False


def calc(expr):
    if is_number(expr):
        return float(expr)    
    arr = expr.split('+')
    if len(arr) > 1:
        return sum(map(calc, arr))
    arr = expr.split('-')
    if len(arr) > 1:
        return reduce(lambda x,y: x-y, map(calc, arr))
    arr = expr.split('*')
    if len(arr) > 1:
        return reduce(lambda x,y: x*y, map(calc, arr), 1)
    arr = expr.split('/')
    if len(arr) > 1:
        return reduce(lambda x,y: x/y, map(calc, arr))


print calc("3+4-2 *2/ 2")    # 5

Nice, isn’t it?