Look up the Perl debugger.

Ahh.. no... it hurts my eyes!!!

But seriously, a debugger is so not a REPL. Take this perl debugger session for example: 

  DB<1> my @foo = 1 .. 10;

  DB<2> print join ", " => @foo;

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I get no response when I create a variable. Then when I try to use it, nothing happens. Is it not in scope anymore? Did an error occur? What is going on? How can I test my code snippets if I get no feedback?

Yes, yes, I know, with some arcane commands and such I can get the debugger to do those thing, but why should I have too? Just consider REPLs in other languages:

Here is Ocaml: 

# let foo = [ 1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; ];;
val foo : int list = [1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10]
# List.iter (fun x -> print_int x) foo;;
12345678910- : unit = ()

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Here is Ruby: 
irb(main):001:0> foo = 1 .. 10
=> 1..10
irb(main):002:0> foo.each {|x| print x }
12345678910=> 1..10

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My python/LISP/Haskell skills are way to rusty this early in the morning (before coffee too!) to write a working example, but I think I have made my point. Why should I have to work (and remember a series of arcane commands) to get what other languages give me for free?

-stvn

In reply to Re^2: RFC: IPerl - Interactive Perl ( read-eval-print loop ) by stvn
in thread RFC: IPerl - Interactive Perl ( read-eval-print loop ) by mseabrook

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