Show instance for SrcSpan

Mon Oct 6 14:28:23 UTC 2014

The way I read Alan's earlier mail is precisely that; auto-generated Show does what he wants (show the entire AST), whereas Outputable hides too much information. I very much understand his frustration with having to manually figure out what constructors and datatypes go where in a compiled program. Alan's point was the *absence* of auto derived Show instances and, in the case of SrcSpan, too much verbosity (rather than wanting stuff to be incomplete).

Allowing some bespoke stuff to reduce the noise of something like record field names for SrcSpan makes even more sense in this context. Similarly, this is why Alan & I want everything to have Data instances, so you can (amongst many other nice things) selectively print parts of the AST.

Ph.

________________________________
From: Alan & Kim Zimmerman <alan.zimm at gmail.com>
Sent: 06 October 2014 15:15
To: Mateusz Kowalczyk
Cc: ghc-devs at haskell.org
Subject: Re: Show instance for SrcSpan

True, but if you are using GHC generated stuff via the GHC API you sometimes do not want to have to implement Outputable for all your app types, when you can auto derive Show which mostly does what you need.

On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 3:11 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk <fuuzetsu at fuuzetsu.co.uk<mailto:fuuzetsu at fuuzetsu.co.uk>> wrote:
On 10/06/2014 01:59 PM, Alan & Kim Zimmerman wrote:
> Is there any reason I can't put in a diff request to replace the derived
> Show instance for SrcSpan with a handcrafted one that does not exhausively
> list the constructors, making it more readable?
>
> Alan
>

Why? If you're looking for pretty output then you should be changing
Outputable.

--
Mateusz K.
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