[Grace-core] fixing REPL's

[Lex Spoon]

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 9:09 PM, James Noble <kjx at ecs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
> right - although one of the things I'm (slowly) learning about Grace
> - no doubt obvious in hindsight - is because we're optionally/gradually typed
> much of the design can be closer to a dynamic language as the execution
> cannot depend upon the types.

A good point. The conceptual problems I described shouldn't apply to Grace.

Given enough resources to implement them, "play spaces" do sound
better than a REPL. In fact, I used to give a short talk on that idea.
I would walk people through an interactive development session in
Squeak, showing how even a pro--much less a beginner--would gain real
productivity by not having to go through a strict edit-compile-eval
cycle.

As unabashed preaching to the choir, here is a web version of that talk:

http://www.lexspoon.org/blog/evalbutton.html

Example 2b includes some intermediate states that are not type safe:

http://www.lexspoon.org/blog/evalbutton-pics/lightsCrashed.png

Also, anyone who hasn't seen them would benefit from Dan Ingalls'
talks on the Lively Kernel:


Lex Spoon