I’ve mentioned before that I think programming languages should have a REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop).

Unfortunately, PHP does not have one natively.  However, I just discovered that Facebook has opened sourced a REPL for PHP – so now you can test out your PHP code without needing to write and run a script.

Working in Python, I’ve found Python’s REPL highly convenient, so I’m going to start using Facebook’s PHP REPL for when I have to work in PHP.

Ironically, Facebook’s PHP REPL is implement in Python. I can commiserate: given the choice between Python and PHP, I’d go with Python.