> instead of having to invoke the REPL from your editor, your REPL invokes your editor--honestly it seems like the right relationship and now I'm fairly confuse

> instead of having to invoke the REPL from your editor, your REPL invokes your editor--honestly it seems like the right relationship and now I'm fairly confused why other REPL focused languages don't commonly support this. That is originally how REPLs worked in Lisp and APL systems in the 1960s. In BBN Lisp/Interlisp (see http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/bbnlisp/W-21_LISP_Editor_Apr67.pdf http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/bbnlisp/W-...) and APL\360 you called the built-in editor from the REPL. There were not really any stand-alone interactive editor programs around back then, and the operating systems BBN Lisp and APL ran on mostly did not properly support running multiple processes to run editors anyway. Maclisp on ITS had job control, and you could call external editors: http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/edit.html http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/edit.html Doing it the other way around is better for projects written in multiple languages, dealing with multiple implementations, running processes on remote systems, and IDE features.