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[DemiReticent]

For anyone familiar with command line, a group of students at my school are trying to write a Java program that can access the command-line accessible program "set," specifically "set /a" for the sake of entering a simple mathematical expression and getting an answer without having to re-write that program to parse input in the form of a mathematical expression.

Essentially, given an input such as:
3 + 4

Utilize "set /a [expression]" syntax from the command line to yield the answer 7 and output to the Java console.

I believe that there is a way to do this with C++, but is this even possible within the Java Virtual Machine?

[Captain Pierce]

Look at the exec method of the Runtime class: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Runtime.html. This really isn't a good solution though, instead the students should implement a parser themselves or look for third-party libraries that will do it for them. Interfacing with the operating system in this manner kills one of the big benefits of a language such as Java, which is the ability to work cross-platform.