A nice little mode that acts like an interactive Lisp interpreter. It doesn’t do all the fancy shell stuff such as redirection – use the EmacsShell if you need that. IELM is an alternative to Lisp Interactive mode, which is the mode of buffer ‘*scratch*’.
Start it using ‘M-x ielm’.
It’s real little read-eval-print loop (REPL).
IELM is a ComintMode.
You can use Icicles completion in IELM. Whenever there are multiple completion candidates, Icicles completion is used (if Icicle minor mode is on). This means you can cycle to choose a candidate, complete using one or more substrings or regexps (progressive completion), and so on. See Icicles - Completion in Comint Modes.
You can use emacs itself as an inferior-lisp-program which means you’re still sending lisp forms to an external process.