When learning a new language, I find it really helpful if I can test out new syntax and language constructs without going through the trouble of creating a file and all the boilerplate along with it. Perl doesn’t have this capability built-in, as far as I know, but there’s this great CPAN module that claims to do the same thing. It’s a short little module (just about 100 SLOC), and it gives you a familiar prompt:
Perl 5.14.2 (Tue Feb 4 23:09:53 UTC 2014) [linux panlong 2.6.42-37-generic #58-ubuntu smp thu jan 24 15:28:10 utc 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 gnulinux ] Type "help;", "copyright;", or "license;" for more information. >>>
It’s not very obvious how to set up the thing though. I installed the module and its dependencies via cpanm, and then created this little snippet in a file called perlthon.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl use 5.010; use strict; use warnings; use Perl::Shell; Perl::Shell::shell();
Then, the shell started right up.