However, the history of command lines and REPLs is basically a session transcript and goes away after N lines of input.

Hm. I do a lot of experiments with my REPL. There is almost always a copy running in my system somewhere. With a command line history of 500 lines and and a 1000 line console.That's usually more than enough to record the experiments for as long as I need them.

On the rare occasions that I wish to keep something, I have a habit of C&Ping the relevant bits of the console log into the script as a comment or after and __END__ tag.

But mostly I'm not interested in the things I tried that failed, only that which worked. And that ends up in whatever script I was doing my experiments for. So if I want to find it again, I just grep *.pl for it.

If I used your method, I would still end up grepping for it as I would find it onerous--if not impossible--to come up with enough meaningful names to accurately catalog all the experiments I do with my REPL.

Still, we all have our own ways of working, and if yours works for you, that's all that matters. It does seem awfully laborious though.