For languages like C that don't ship with a repl we don't currently implement one -- although we probably should, since a lot of them have third-party repl libraries.
Check our most of our other languages. They're proper repls I promise ;)
I wrote about the distinction you're talking about when we released swift support:
No love for Common Lisp? Please add Common Lisp :).
Anyway, pretty nice collection of languages you have there; a lot of which I want to play with but don't feel like installing a proper toolchain yet. So I'll definitely use the service :).
Re:TIO: Try it online
by sbierwagen on Saturday July 15, 2017 @03:54PM
(#14778578)
Usually when I go to repl.it it's to do something in a python console if I'm at a computer that doesn't have python installed: https://repl.it/languages/python
It's actually quite simple: 'options' are command line options that you can supply, I don't know PHP but for Ruby it might be `-p` for example. Header and Footer are just glued to the code by newlines.
Oh command line options. Then what are 'arguments', a little further below?
Options are what get passed to the interpreter. Arguments get passed to the program.
How the interpreter gets called for most languages roughly goes like:
interpreter options input.tio arguments
Still, I like the website better than TIO. At TIO I picked PHP to test and it gives me options like headers, options (without a list of options/settings to modify, just an "Add" button)... I just want to type code in an editor and run it. Repl.it also has syntax highlighting.
(For those who don't know, REPL is read-evaluate-print-loop, so it takes an input (e.g. "int i = 0;"), evaluates it (runs it), prints any output, and loops back to the start.)