Julia REPL flow coming from Matlab

New to Julia
5

As Elrod mentioned, there is no such thing as a “clear”, but you can redefine you variables at will:

data = [ 1, 2, 3 ]
f(data)
data = [ 2, 3, 4 ]
f(data)

Assuming that your data is constant, as you described initially, you could very directly just load a script repeatedly with the analysis and plotting/report functions, as you fiddle with the analysis functions, something as:

include("set_data.jl")
include("analyze.jl")
include("report.jl")
#--- change something in "analyze.jl"
include("analyze.jl")
include("report.jl")

where the analyze.jl and report.jl files include both the functions and the call to those functions using the data variables. I use that frequently for fast exploration of code.

When things get more complicated, you probably want to use Revise (or even before things get complicated). With Revise you can include your script once, and the changes will be tracked automatically. In that case, the call to the functions should be done at the REPL (not included in the scripts). Something like:

using Revise
include("set_data.jl")
includet("analyze.jl") # note the "t", for track
includet("report.jl") 

result = analyze(data)
report(result)

# Modifity the functions inside analyze.jl and report.jl
# new run will be automatically with the new versions:

result = analyze(data)
report(result)

Some people just use Revise by default. And Revise goes well with modules, in which case, if you had defined a module MyModule in a file MyModule.jl, with the functions of analyze.jl and report.jl, such as

module MyModule
  include("analyze.jl")
  include("report.jl")
  export analyze, report
end

loading it with

using Revise
using MyModule # if you are in the folder where "MyModule.jl" is*

you will be able to modify the functions inside those files and they will be always be automatically updated at every new call in the REPL.

These options do not work if you redefine a data structure. Then you have to restart over. I usually keep also a script which just runs the above commands to restart the developing section when that is needed, starting julia with julia -i devel.jl.

*If you want to load the module from other folder, you need to add that folder to the LOAD_PATH, with:

 push!(LOAD_PATH,"/path/to/MyModule")

(I don’t like this much, is there a way to just point directly to the module file?)

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