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There is a name for a "REPL" that does what you're describing: a debugger. REPL stands for "read eval print loop", which is what precisely this is and not what

• barrkel 12y ago
  No, a debugger is something that supports, at a minimum, breakpoints, stepping and memory inspection. Many debuggers - if not most - do not support arbitrary constructs in the language being debugged. They don't normally support creating new variables (by which I explicitly do not mean a name for an expression). And they very rarely support writing new or overwriting existing functions. When I use pry, it's normally as a REPL with scope bindings, not as a debugger. That is, I don't use it for breakpoints or stepping. I use it to write code in the context of where the code is going to live. When I need to modify a Ruby method, I stick a binding.pry in it, then write the new code iteratively in the console in the context of a test or seed data, and copy and paste finished code into an editor when I'm happy with the results. A REPL that only supports creating new definitions is simply not very useful to me. It doesn't support what I use REPLs for. They're mostly just toys - IMO.