x
x
x


Do so in a way which:

 does not involve string manipulation of the input source code
 is plausibly extensible to a runtime-chosen set of bindings rather than just x
 does not make x a global variable


or note that these are impossible.



See also

 For more general examples and language-specific details, see Eval.
 Dynamic variable names is a similar task.


 
code = loadstring"return x^2" --this doesn't really need to be input, does it?
val1 = setfenv(code, {x = io.read() + 0})()
val2 = setfenv(code, {x = io.read() + 0})()
print(val2 - val1)
 