> All I can say is "why not." Calculators cost money but you can make one for
> free.  Actually I have my old HP48 but wanted to do this anyway.

I want a TI-81, but anyway...

> Where I got stuck before (this is an old project which I recently came back
> to) was that I needed to be able to have a whole arbitrary expression as a
> string that I could display as well as evaluating it to a float that I
> could plot.  val() of course can convert a string literal to a float, but
> val("2+2") returns the number 2.

Yes... AFAIK, POV-Ray doesn't have anything to evaluate a string as a 
command. (Except your current method, obviously.)

> Any better ideas?

GNUplot will plot most functions you can think of quickly and easily. 
(Also has a bunch of additional features - it handles complex numbers, 
can do logarithmic axies, can do half a dozen different types of 
statistical plots, will plot data from a file, etc etc etc...)

;-)

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