I like the concept of a REPL: an interactive environment where you can redefine code and evaluate snippets to see the result.
I try to avoid the term "REPL" though. Most languages don't use "read" for parsing (the R) and it's confusing. Are there good alternatives?
miniblog.
Related Posts
I've been experimenting with an 'evaluate up to cursor' mode for my PL project.
I love evaluating self-contained snippets in Lisp, this generalises the idea.
The interpreter remembers the arguments when you run tests, then can re-use them when you say 'eval up to here'.
What do you think?
Thinking more about the "auto eval definitions" approach, I think it breaks down when debugging. If I want to step through the existing definition, it'd be really awkward to re-evaluate the definition at my cursor.
The lisp model of programming is generally: write a function, evaluate it, interactively call it with some arguments, iterate. Jupyter notebooks are similar.
Why not automatically evaluate definitions (not expressions) whilst working? It seems like it could be a satisfying way to work with code.