REPLAn acronym for the Lisp programming language family's very general and famous meta-level architecture for extension. REPL stands for read-eval-print loop. This means it can be expressed in terms of the standard functions READ, EVAL, and PRINT composed together using an interactive listener to receive incoming expressions. This is applied to both user input, file input, and even communications over a distributed channel.
In all of these cases, the interface presented is termed a listener, and is generally presumed to be uniform except in specific cases of reflective modification or modifications for the terminal (TTY usually).