They always were in my source files. Nearly all of the text I type in a Lisp project is in a source file that is managed by a revision-control system. That's th

They always were in my source files. Nearly all of the text I type in a Lisp project is in a source file that is managed by a revision-control system. That's the way I've worked with Lisp systems for more than thirty years. I send my changes to the repl with the stroke of a key. Working with a repl doesn't necessarily mean typing text at a prompt. The prompt isn't the repl; it's just a particular UI for the repl. Smalltalk systems do tend to store edits in the memory image (though they also write them automatically to a changes file and a sources file, so they aren't lost if you blow away your working image). Smalltalkers generally prefer to work in the image and treat text files as a serialization format for exchanging code and data. But normally there's no question of getting "changes back in your source file" because they were always in your source file, or its equivalent, from the start.