A basic REPL will go a long way toward making Erie feel like a true Lisp. It doesn’t need to be fancy and support helper functions, tab-completion, or even the “up arrow” to redo the last expression. All we want (for now) is to read an expression, evaluate it on the fly, print the result, and repeat.

I was able to put together something that reads input and starts a new Task to compile and evaluate it. But this isn’t terribly useful because Erie is missing a standard library. The only functions that can be called are Elixir or Erlang functions (but they work!).

Core(1)> (Elixir.String.split "abc def ghi")
["abc", "def", "ghi"]
Core(2)> ('erlang.atom_to_binary 'derp 'unicode)
"derp"

This is a nice start but defining our own functions in the REPL and calling them would be better.

In Elixir’s REPL, you can do this, but not using def … do … end (unless it’s wrapped in defmodule … do … end). That’s a bit obnoxious, so I want my REPL to handle (def …) gracefully. I do that by stealing a feature of Clojure’s REPL where you’re effectively “in” a module while in the REPL, so any function defined is a part of that module.

I want to make as much use of my Translator module as possible, but as it’s currently written, it requires all function definitions to be inside a module (now I see why Eilixr may have made that decision). To get around this, I wrap each call to (def …) in a new module thats name is based on a counter. For example, this defintion of x in the REPL

Core(1)> (def x [] 1)

would be compiled as if I wrote

(defmodule Core1) (def x [] 1)

And this defintion of y

Core(2)> (def y [] 2)

would be compiled as if I wrote

(defmodule Core2) (def y [] 2)

This works great, but now calling x the intended way produces an error because it’s not defined in the Core module.

Core(1)> (def x [] 1)
Core(2)> (Core.x)

20:27:31.177 [error] Task #PID<0.143.0> started from Erie.Repl terminating
** (UndefinedFunctionError) function :Core.x/0 is undefined (module :Core is not available)

To solve this, we can keep track of all functions defined in the REPL and their associated modules. If one of them is invoked under the Core module, we can intercept the call and translate it to the correct module.

The REPL is by no means complete, but it feels good to be able to write some Erie and see it execute in realtime.