Using the REPL

REPL is an acronym that stands for Read–Eval–Print Loop. An REPL is an interactive shell environment in which programs can be executed with immediate results given. The interactive shell environment can be invoked by running the kotlinc command without any arguments.

If the REPL is successfully started, a welcome message will be printed in your terminal followed by >>> on the next line, alerting us that the REPL is awaiting input. Now you can type in code within the terminal, as you would in any text editor, and get immediate feedback from the REPL. This is demonstrated in the following screenshot:

In the preceding screenshot, the 1 and 2 integers are assigned to x and y, respectively. The sum of x and y is stored in a new z variable and the value held by z is printed to the display with the print() function.