Cameron Laird's personal notes on interactive Perl

• Most common is to take over the built-in debugger as

         perl -de 42
     

  Not only does this give a(n unprompted) command evaluator, it also exposes the symbol table and variable values, permits stack backtraces, and allows for breakpoints.
• perlsh is a more-or-less well-known three-liner:

        #!/usr/bin/perl
        print ":-) ";
        while (<>) { print eval; print ( ($@ || "\n") . ":-)" ) }     
     

  There are slightly more elaborate forms in the standard distribution and elsewhere.
• perl-shell ...
• psh is ... [Does psh work properly under Windows?]
• Perl Data Language "turns perl in to a free, array-oriented, numerical language similar to such commerical packages as IDL and MatLab." Its perldl is "a simple interactive shell".
• "Zoidberg (also here, and as Bundle::Zoidberg from CPAN) provides a modular Perl shell written, configured, and operated entirely in Perl. It aspires to be a fully operational login shell with all the features one normally expects. But it also gives direct access to Perl objects and data structures from the command line, and allows you to run Perl code within the scope of your commandline. . . ."