I Was Born A REPL

I have seen the Perl module Devel::REPL a few times. I haven't seen much use for it, thinking I can write a quick Perl program if I need to and a one-liner if necessary. Who needs a Perl shell?

Then I had reason to learn Python, or actually Jython, or a tool that used Jython for scripting. I went to the O'Reilly, and it started with using Python as a shell. (Or, Jython. Or ... whatever.) Then the oddest thing happened.

I used the Python shell as a calculator.

More than once.

That wasn't the push that made me consider re.pl. It was this helpful .rc file from recent blog commenter xenoterracide.

I don't use it often yet. I keep test.pl with the current test code at the top and most everything but the module declarations commented out, just for this purpose. And, as a purely aesthetic issue, I want to munge the way the prompt looks. But I'm sure I will use it.