That's probably just a historic accident. Most modern languages have an interactive prompt now. For example Scala, as you mention. Another factor might be the

That's probably just a historic accident. Most modern languages have an interactive prompt now. For example Scala, as you mention. Another factor might be the availability of type inferencing, which makes interactive prompts perhaps more viable, as you can for example type "1 + 1" into the prompt, and its type is automatically deduced.