Why it's OK that perl doesn't really have irb (ipl?)
Ok, so irb is totally great for testing out some syntax and general sanity checking, but we don’t really have that with perl…or do we?
I am sure that all of the real perl hackers out there know this, but the best perl shell is your real shell. If I wanna do some cool stuff with perl I can do a lot of it directly from my shell with -e (I recommend -E as you can use ‘say’, which is helpful so that you can avoid quote issues.)
Anyway, since my brain has been so affected by ruby functional programming I have been doing a lot of:
perl -Mautobox::Core -E '@f = (<*.foo>); @f->foreach(sub { ... })'
So I am making an alias like this:
alias ipl='perl -Mautobox::Core -E'
Every little keystroke matters in such a case :-)
Anyway, hope this helps at least remind you of the power you already have.
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