Once I asked about read-eval-print loops for Perl in the Roma-pm mailing list.

dada gave me some excellent hints in his reply which I dare to transcribe here:

A pair of links:

How can I use Perl interactively? In short: use the debugger.

Is there a Perl shell? Excellent pointers.

Reinventing wheels is a good thing, if only for sport and self-learning.