[dahart]

Why would adding fancy select or cut-and-paste features to a REPL make it not a REPL? Selectively choosing which lines to run is just a convenience to let you not have to type the whole line or set of lines again, it doesn’t really change the base interaction with the interpreter.

[lelanthran]

> Why would adding fancy select or cut-and-paste features to a REPL make it not a REPL?

For the same reason that adding (working) wings to a car makes it not a car anymore.[1]

I mean, to my mind, when something is satisfying a different primary use-case, then that thing is a different thing.

I'm sure there's some fuzziness in the distinction between "This is a REPL/car and this is a Notebook/plane".

Usually it's very easy to see the distinction - the REPL is waiting for the next command and the next command only while the notebook takes whatever input you give it, determines whether it got a command or content, and reacts appropriately.

[1] Tons of examples, TBH. I don't refer to my computer as my calculator, even though the computer does everything a fancy calculator can do. People don't call motorcycles 'bicycles', even though the motorcycle can go anywhere that a legal bicycle can go. More telling is how people don't call their computer monitor 'TV' and don't call the TV a 'Monitor' even when the same actual item is used for both (i.e. I repurposed an old monitor as a small-screen netflix-box, and now an item that used to be called 'monitor' by wife and kids is called 'TV' by wife and kids).

[fragmede]

a flying car with wings is still a car. that's the whole point of it. it can drive you to the airport and drive like like a car. I don't care what you call your computer, it can still do math. people who have their TV hooked up to their computer would more readily refer to it as a monitor. idk, I just think REPLs are kinda shit for interacting with the present state of a kernel (as Jupyter calls them). Jupyters better, but still kinda shit because it could automatically infer the important variables in scope and keep a watch list like a debugger does. And then suggest things to do with them since it's a repl and not an IDE. but the thing is fundamentally they're Read Edit Print Loop interfaces to the computer and its current working state.

[dahart]

Ugh this is a gish gallop of broken straw man analogies. Being able to select and evaluate a single line in a notebook is nothing like adding wings to a car. Fundamentally, selecting a line to evaluate is no different from typing that line again. It’s a shortcut and nothing more, the interaction is still read-eval-print. Note REPL doesn’t even refer to where the input comes from, the point is simply that it handles your input, processes it, displays the result, and then waits for you for more input. This is as opposed to executing a file where the interpreter exits once the execution is completed, and the return value is not automatically printed.

Jupyter Notebook absolutely is a REPL, see my sibling comment above for the WP link describing it as such. It waits for input, then evals the input, the prints the return value, and then loops.