Matt Hellige writes:

So it seems natural, especially to new users, to hope that Haskell and the ML variants, sharing many other features common to these languages, would offer this facility as well. The answer, in general, is that they do not.

(Sorry for the belated reply.) Evidently, some ML variants do include eval or eval-like facilities. When reading through the sources of the Isabelle 2002 proof verification system, I noticed the "use_text" eval-like function which is implemented using the following system-specific functions: smlnj-0.93: System.Compile.use_stream polyml: PolyML.Compiler mlworks, mosml: use Carl Witty