1. A computer system for processing events, comprising: a communication interface that receives an event message; and a processing unit, coupled to the communication interface, that processes the event message and that further obtains, parses and tokenizes a character string comprising one or more delimited elements selected from the group consisting of a constant, a variable and a function, wherein each function accepts as input the one or more delimited elements; wherein the processing unit further evaluates the parsed and tokenized character string in response to receiving the event message and initiates an action based upon the result of the evaluation; and wherein the processing unit further creates a common execution environment for performing the processing, obtaining, parsing, tokenizing and evaluation.