Re: Support for interactive interpreters...

On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Branden wrote:

> I'm actually not following this list from close and I searching the archives
> isn't that easy yet, so pardon me if this was already brought up.
>
> I work with Perl and I also work with Tcl, and one thing I actually like
> about Tcl is that it's interactive like a shell, i.e. it gives you a prompt,
> where you type commands in and, if you type a whole command by the end of
> the line, it executes it, otherwise, it gives you another prompt and keeps
> reading more lines until the whole command is typed, when it's executed. I
> think this is particularly useful for:
> a) testing features (what the value of ... would be if I ...?)

This may not sound obvious but I use the Perl Data Language (PDL) for
interactive testing since it provides a shell interface. It's not perfect
(needs to be extended to handle multi-line input) but it's a start.

Both Python and Tcl support features like this and I agree that a perl
shell would be useful.

-- 
Tim Jenness
JCMT software engineer/Support scientist
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~timj