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I am looking for a term that I heard recently but can't think of at the moment. It's on the tip of my tongue.

What is it called when you are able to execute individual cells / blocks of code, see the output, and the system maintains state between execution of the cells?

For example, this is a feature of Mathematica notebooks, Jupyter notebooks, etc. But the term I'm looking for is more narrow than "notebook interface" or "literate programming", as it doesn't require pretty printing, text cells, etc. The purpose is more for testing syntax or seeing output dynamically than it is for creating a readable document.

I think it was an acronym, possibly four letters...

Alexander Gruber
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Read–eval–print loop (REPL) enables interactive mode of development where expressions are evaluated on the fly as opposed to the traditional edit-compile-run-debug cycle. For example, Scala's REPL, or OCaml's REPL:

...permits interactive use of the OCaml system through a read-eval-print loop (REPL). In this mode, the system repeatedly reads OCaml phrases from the input, then typechecks, compile and evaluate them, then prints the inferred type and result value...

Informally, I have often heard the distinction being referred to as simply interpreter vs. compiler, for example, "Let's quickly try it out in the interpreter".

Mario Galic
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