Pry is an interactive shell for the Ruby programming language. It is notable for its Smalltalk-inspiredThe Pry Ecosystem — John Mair, 2012 link ability to start a REPL within a running program. This lets programmers debug and modify the current state of a system.
Features
Pry exposes most of its introspective capabilities using a filesystem metaphor.Pry — Reuven M. Lerner, LinuxJournal, July 2012, pp28 link, or For example, it has a cd command to start interacting with a particular object, and uses ls to list methods and variables.
It is possible to start Pry at any point inside a running program.Interactive Debugging With Pry — Alan MacDougall, 2012 link, or Due to the reflective nature of Ruby, this lets the programmer inspect the program, change its current state, or correct the source code without restarting the process.
A number of third party plugins are available for Pry, these add tighter integration with other Ruby projects, enhance the abilities of Pry itself, and make Pry available over a remote connection.
See also
Comparison of computer shells IPython — A similar piece of software for the Python programming language SLIME — An interactive Lisp shell for Emacs Tweak — A Smalltalk programming environment
References
External links
Wiki documentation Introductory video