IELM is a REPL for Emacs Lisp. It is built upon comint, a major mode for interacting with subprocesses that accept input and return output. But wait, how can this possibly work if it’s Emacs comint is speaking to? After all, it doesn’t behave like, say, bash and convincing an Emacs process to behave this way in a proper manner is sort of difficult[1].
Such petty things do of course not deter Real Emacs Lisp Hackers™. Instead of fixing comint to be more flexible about its mode of operation, well, just see for yourself:
;; A dummy process to keep comint happy. It will never get any input (unless (comint-check-proc (current-buffer)) ;; Was cat, but on non-Unix platforms that might not exist, so ;; use hexl instead, which is part of the Emacs distribution. (condition-case nil (start-process "ielm" (current-buffer) "hexl") (file-error (start-process "ielm" (current-buffer) "cat"))) ...)
| [1] | Worst REPL ever: emacs --batch --eval '(while (princ (format "%s\n" (eval (read-minibuffer "EMACS> ")))))'. Courtesy to #emacs for the initial version! |