preplish

Project Status: Active

Perl REPL in Shell: a simple REPL for Perl 5 written in Bash with grep, sed, awk, and Perl.

It runs wherever Perl, Bash, grep, sed, and awk run. (In short, it's portable.)

This project aims to be a good|fun|easy REPL that has value for general programming and data analysis with Perl. Low barrier to entry, quick productivity. You may find it useful as well as easy to understand.

Features:

• you can start the REPL and add valid Perl statements line-by-line
• a new subroutine or for loop can be on entirely on a single line or multi-line; if multi-line, close the scope with "}##"
• run current code with parameters (must be handled as @ARGV)
• run a specific function with or without parameters
• the code is checked (perl -I . -c $file) after every statement (subroutines and loops must be completed before they are checked)
• import an existing Perl file (see the sample template)
• create checkpoint files
• you can append a DATA section to the code and work with the data
• export the result as a checkpoint file that contains both your code and the DATA (a complete "notebook", a sort of Stupyder Notebook (o: )
• ls dir, grep $somefile for "sub" and "package"
• list valid REPL commands, command history, and list the current code
• on exit, the code is saved to a file named using a date-stamp
• if perldoc is detected, you can search (Perldoc is a separate installation)
• if perltidy is detected, it is used to improve the display of code

Known Problems and Planned Features

• if an imported module does not export a method mentioned in the qw(), the module may need to be updated using cpan or cpanminus
• add search highlight for given string
• enable comment of a previous line or sequence of lines

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Inspiration for this Project

• Bash, Perl, grep, sed, awk
• other REPLs, from simple (Python) to complex (Jupyter)
• Readline vi Mode https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-vi-Mode.html
• This post by Mike Stroyan:

Subject: Re: Readline history and bash's read -e

Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2007 16:36:20 -0600

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2007-09/msg00004.html

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Other Perl REPLs

If Preplish doesn't meet your needs, there are alternatives.

Some Perl folks use the Perl debugger:

perl -de 0

If you need more features, this Perl REPL is a well-known alternative:

https://metacpan.org/pod/Reply