in reply to A perl shell (sorta)

Or even simpler:
perl -debug
which puts you into the debugger debugging a program consisting of bug;!

Warning: this works only on recent Perls, probably 5.004 and later. Whichever Perl where you could nestle the code up against the -e switch. Prior to that, you had to so something like:

perl -de 0

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker