Hilfe stands for Hubbes Incremental LPC Front End, and is an incremental Pike evaluator. As the name hints Hilfe has its roots back when Pike was called LPC, but none of the code from that Hilfe remains. Hilfe is one of the most useful tools for Pike developers, since it enables them to try various Pike constructions and see how they work. Even the most experienced Pike programmer can forget how the return data structure of a function looks like or if + or | is the best way to merge to mappings for a specific purpose.

In short hilfe is a command line version of Pike, allowing you to do real time evaluation of Pike code. Simply write a line of Pike code and press return. If you gave Hilfe a complete block of code it will be evaluated and the result will be returned. Side effects will also be effective, hence changing a variable will indeed change the variables value. You are of course not limited to basic variable types like integers and strings, or reference data types like mappings and arrays. You can just as well define functions and classes, enabling you to experiment with inherits, operator overloading and other object oriented things. To start Hilfe, just execute the Pike binary without any arguments.

bash$ pike
Pike v7.3 release 49 running Hilfe v3.5 (Incremental Pike Frontend)
> int a=5;
> a+3.3;
(1) Result: 8.300000
> (string)(enumerate(32)[*]+65);
(2) Result: "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\\]^_`"
> string b=(string)(enumerate(32)[*]+65);
> b/(a+3.3);
(3) Result: ({ /* 4 elements */
                "ABCDEFGH",
                "IJKLMNOPQ",
                "RSTUVWXY",
                "Z[\\]^_`"
            })
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