I've heard many places that PHP's eval function is often not the answer. In light of PHP 5.3's LSB and closures we're running out of reasons to depend on eval or create_function.
Is there is any conceivable cases where eval is the best (only?) answer in PHP 5.3?
This question is not about whether eval is evil in general, as it obviously is not.
If you are writing a site that interprets and executes PHP code, like an interactive shell would.
...
I'm a systems guy, that's all I got.
An appropriate occasion (given the lack of easy alternatives) would be when trusted data was serialized with var_export and it's necessary to unserialize it. Of course, it should never have been serialized in that fashion, but sometimes the error is already done.
If you're writing malware and you want to make life hard for the sysadmin who's trying to clean up after you. That seems to be the most common usage case in my experience.
I suppose, eval should be used where the code is actually needs to be compiled. I mean such cases like template file compilations (template language into PHP for the sake of performance), plugin hook compilation, compilations for performance reasons etc.