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nikonyrh | 1 year ago

"In a notebook, you can go back and edit and run individual lines of the notebook without re-running the whole notebook from the start and without re-computing everything that depends on what you just edited."

Isn't this a standard on REPLs as well? You can select the code you wish to run, and press Ctrl+Enter or what ever. I must admit, I've programmed Python for about 10 years in Spyder and VS Code now, but I haven't used notebooks at any point. Just either ad-hoc scripts or actual source files.

My definition of a "notebook" is an ad-hoc script, split into individual "cells" which are typically run as a whole. On my workflow, I just select the code I wish to run. Sometimes it is one expression, one line, 100 lines or 1000 lines depending what I've changed on the script.

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lelanthran|1 year ago

> Isn't this a standard on REPLs as well? You can select the code you wish to run, and press Ctrl+Enter or what ever.

Not usually, no. Type `python` at the command prompt - what you get is a REPL. Type `clisp` at the command prompt, or `wish`, or `psql`, or `perl` or even `bash` - those are al REPLs.

Very different to a program that presents an editor, and then lets the user selectively choose which lines/expressions in that editor to run next. For example, type `emacs somefile.sql` in the command prompt. The application that opens is most definitely not a READ-EVAL-PRINT-LOOP.

dahart|1 year ago

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.