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copied!<blockquote> <p>I am thinking more along the lines of Ruby, ...</p> </blockquote> <p>Well for Ruby the <code>irb</code> interactive prompt is a great tool for "practicing" something simple. Here are the things I'll mention about the irb to give you an idea of effective use:</p> <ul> <li><p><em>Automation</em>. You are allowed a <code>.irbrc</code> file that will be automatically executed when launching irb. That means you can load your favorite libraries or do <em>whatever</em> you want in full Ruby automatically. To see what I mean check out some of the ones at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110824004021/http://dotfiles.org:80/.irbrc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">dotfiles.org</a>.</p></li> <li><p><em>Autocompletion</em>. That even makes writing code easier. Can't remember that string method to remove newlines? <code>"".ch<tab></code> produces chop and chomp. <em>NOTE: you have to enable autocompletion for irb yourself</em></p></li> <li><p><em>Divide and Conquer</em>. irb makes the small things really easy. If you're writing a function to manipulate strings, the ability to test the code interactively right in the prompt saves a lot of time! For instance you can just open up irb and start running functions on an example string and have working and tested code already ready for your library/program. </p></li> <li><p><em>Learning, Experimenting, and Hacking</em>. Something like this would take a very long time to test in C/C++, even Java. If you tried testing them all at once you might seg-fault and have to start over.</p> <p>Here I'm just learning how the <code>String#[]</code> function works.</p> <pre><code>joe[~]$ irb >> "12341:asdf"[/\d+/] # => "12341" >> "12341:asdf"[/\d*/] # => "12341" >> "12341:asdf"[0..5] # => "12341:" >> "12341:asdf"[0...5] # => "12341" >> "12341:asdf"[0, ':'] TypeError: can't convert String into Integer from (irb):5:in `[]' from (irb):5 >> "12341:asdf"[0, 5] # => "12341" </code></pre></li> <li><p><em>Testing and Benchmarking</em>. Now they are nice and easy to perform. <a href="http://ozmm.org/posts/time_in_irb.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Here</a> is someone's idea to emulate the Unix <code>time</code> function for quick benchmarking. Just add it to your <code>.irbrc</code> file and its always there!</p></li> <li><p><em>Debugging</em> - I haven't used this much myself but there is always the ability to debug code <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080912141043/http://www.rubycentral.com:80/pickaxe/trouble.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">like this</a>. Or pull out some code and run it in the irb to see what its actually doing.</p></li> </ul> <p>I'm sure I'm missing some things but I hit on my favorite points. You really have zero limitation in shells so you're limited only by what you can think of doing. I almost always have a few shells running. Bash, Javascript, and Ruby's irb to name a few. I use them for a lot of things!</p>

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