What are the limitations and walkarounds of Scala interpreter?

Question

What kind of constructs need 'scalac' compile and how to make an equivalent that will work in interpreter?

Edit: I want to use scala instead of python as a scripting language. (with #!/usr/bin/scala)

Answer 1

You ought to be able to do anything in the REPL that you can do in outside code. Keep in mind that:

• Things that refer to each other circularly need to be inside one block. So the following can't be entered as-is; you have to wrap it inside some other object:

  class C(i : Int) { def succ = C(i+1) }
object C { def apply(i: Int) = new C(i) }

• The execution environment is somewhat different, so benchmarking timings will not always come out the same way as if you run them from compiled code.

• You enter the execution path a different way; if you want to call a main method, though, you certainly can from inside the REPL.

• You can't just cut-and-paste an entire library into the REPL and have it work exactly like the library did; the REPL has a different structure than normal packages do. So drop the "package" declarations during testing.