There are various REPL programs for perl, as a simple google search will attest. You might take a look at them and see if any fit your needs. With Terminal::Readline (IIRC) and the eval statement, it's not too difficult to cobble something together a simple REPL. So you might start with a simple one and add whatever features you want...

A couple links that google gave me are:

• Yet another Perl REPL
• Writing a perl read-eval-print loop (REPL) - part 1
• An eight-line REPL in Perl.

...roboticus

Update: I didn't even think of CPAN which has a few interesting REPL and Shell modules. (e.g. Devel::REPL, Carp::REPL, Perl::Shell, ....)

Also see Perl::Shell, which tries to be what the Python shell is, but with Perl.

I'm probably showing my age when I write this (I was born in the late 50's), but the Perl debugger is fine for me -- but then, I've used a variety of debug monitors and IDEs in my career, this one just has a variety of different commands for the same things that I want to do.

I use the debugger for small things I want to try out, and occasionally for tracking down a more complex problem. That's my way of saying it might be faster (with regard to your two points about line continuations and readline support suggest that) just to write a one-time script and step through it in the debugger.

As far as learning you have to type print $x or x $x, I'm guessing you haven't spent that much time useing the debugger. If you had, you'd know how to

• set a breakpoint (b);
• run (c);
• step through code (n);
• step down into a function (s);
• dump values (x); and
• quit (q).

Once you've got those basics down, you can get into more esoteric things, such as running until a variable is equal to a specific value, clearing breakpoints (B, I think) and so forth.

If you're keen to improve the Perl debugger, remember, this is open source -- feel free to jump in and help out.

• My Ubuntu Perl shell doesn't have readline support

Installing the package libterm-readline-gnu-perl should get you readline support.

BTW, while looking up the exact package name (i.e. apt-cache search readline | grep perl), I accidentally also found perlconsole.  Maybe that's another one for you to try out...

$ apt-cache show perlconsole
...
Description: small program that lets you evaluate Perl code interactiv
+ely
 Perl Console is a light program that lets you evaluate Perl code
 interactively. It uses Readline for grabing input and provides comple
+tion
 with all the namespaces loaded during your session.
 .
 This is pretty useful for Perl developers that write modules.
 You can load a module in your session and test a function exported by
+ the
 module.
[download]

(I'm not a big fan of REPLs myself (prefer to have code in my editor), so I can't comment on its usefulness.)

I prefer ending with __END__ because then you can copy/paste the code and its output and see easily where the code ends and the output begins.

[kirsle@damocles ~]$ perl
print "Hello world!\n";
use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex);
for (1..5) {
    print "$_ => " . md5_hex($_) . "\n";
}
__END__
Hello world!
1 => c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b
2 => c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c
3 => eccbc87e4b5ce2fe28308fd9f2a7baf3
4 => a87ff679a2f3e71d9181a67b7542122c
5 => e4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5
[kirsle@damocles ~]$
[download]