In a recent guide we had a look at CircuitScheme: a Scheme-like Lisp dialect implemented in CircuitPython. One area of improvement that was mentioned was the improvement of the REPL.

A read–eval–print loop (REPL), also termed an interactive toplevel or language shell, is a simple, interactive programming environment that takes single user inputs (i.e., single expressions), evaluates them, and returns the result to the user; a program written in a REPL environment is executed piecewise.

The prior REPL in CircuitScheme was just a way to enter code via the console. It simply reads characters and tried to evaluate what you entered when you ended the line.

This guide walks through a more feature complete REPL for CircuitScheme. Even though it was written for CircuitScheme, it's completely independent except for 2 function calls. This means that it's quite general and can easily be adapted to most situations where you need to enter keyboard commands to a CircuitPython app.

In CPython there is the readline module that pulls in GNU readline. readline provides a very feature-rich line editor.  That's not an option for CircuitPython, but we can do much the same thing in pure Python.

This guide was first published on Feb 20, 2019. It was last updated on Mar 19, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

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