What are your goals in pausing the REPL? Especially when working with the REPL on a running application, I find invoking async operations
with a callback like this one to be a lot more useful. Not saying you have to use that module or that your motivations are incorrect - this just happens to be my solution to the problem of wanting to track multiple, often dependent, asynchronous REPL operations.
Another great solution is to have REPL scripts saved locally somewhere, inline callbacks and all, and use .load FILE to execute them.