REPL and incremental compilation about never

[bogen85]

https://github.com/never-lang/never/blob/master/back/nev.c#L48 does a module_close ...
And https://github.com/never-lang/never/blob/master/back/nev.c#L91 does a yylex_destroy ...

One of those could be causing some new undesired behavior I'm seeing... (REPL silently exiting after trying a second entry after the first entry was processed correctly...)

[bogen85]

Oh, yylex_destroy calls yy_init_globals, so that is not the issue.

[bogen85]

For now I'm not going to pursue this. Lack of a REPL is no longer a a big deal any more as I can just hit a hot key in a text editor and get instant results of a whole file or selection... (Or do it in a web page)

[bogen85]

Never is a purely functional language.

1. To have an adequate REPL you need to have globals (well, it is difficult without them), which violates pure functionality.
2. Additionally from a REPL it is common to need to redefine variable types. Never is a static language, so that makes this difficult.
3. Some other languages have crude REPL implementations where they keep writing out a main function with the previous entries and new entry combined and compiling and executing it. That is not a true REPL...
4. For a statically typed language to have a decent REPL that functionally ideally needs to be one of the initial design requirements, not added later.
5. For a dynamically type language it is not as hard to add later, but Never is not dynamically typed. (If it were I would not be focusing on it).

All that being said, unless a REPL is designed into Never in some future redesign that is alright, but I don't want to suggest something be added to a Never that would violate it's clean design.

A REPL requires some sort of incremental compilation and always being able to use existing compiled code.