language agnostic - One REPL to bind them all?

Question

I'd like to know if there is a REPL which is not language-specific. I spend a lot of time dipping in and out of REPLs (mainly for Clojure, Scala and Haskell), and the bundled ones all frustrate me to a greater or lesser extent. It seems like the job of a REPL is quite generic in that they:

• Read: take user input
• Evaluate: pass the input to some runtime for processing
• Print: print the results to the screen
• Loop: wait for the next user input

I don't see why there shouldn't be some language-agnostic REPL, but I have been unable to find such a thing. Some things I would like in my ideal REPL:

• Linux command-line application
• Infinite history accessible through the up arrow
• Ability to edit previous commands before re-running
• ctrl-r for history search like bash has
• Multiple sessions in one REPL, so I can switch between them easily

And more optimistically

• syntax highlighting, context-aware code completion

Does this exist?

Answer 1

Bash doesn't know anything about C-r: it uses readline, which does that, as well as up-arrow history, for it. It sounds like the REPL you're looking for is readline? Just prefix the command you want REPL-like behavior from with rlwrap (install it if you don't have it - it's great), and you should be good to go.

$ rlwrap java -jar clojure.jar