I've been required to learn a non-Perl Perl-like language at work to integrate a system written in it with a Perl system.

One thing I noticed is the interactive-mode of its interpreter. I think it borrowed this idea from the functional languages that it seems to have a lot of features from.

In short you get a shell-like prompt ">>> " where you can enter an expression or statement. It then evaluates it and returns a human-readable version of its value.

It also stores previous declarations and values in the current environment. For Perl it might look something like this: 

>>> my $x = 3
3
>>> $x + 2
5
>>> if ($x > 2) {
...     print "hello\n";
... }
hello

>>> $x $x
       ^
Syntax error
>>> $x + $x
6

[download]

I think we have stuff like this already. eg perl -e. The perl debugger. I've also seen here, people rolling there own 20 line scripts to do something similiar.

My question is what is in your opinion, the best way to setup an Interactive Perl Interpreter, and what are the options for pre-rolled ones (eg from CPAN or elsewhere)?

-Andrew.

In reply to Interactive Perl Interpreter by tomazos

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.