:info in ghci

[Hal Daume III]

I see your point.  Though, I wouldn't be averse it it printing fixity for
everything.  From my point of view, when I do :info on something, I want
as much information as possible.

...speaking of which :), would you consider printing the entire datatype
when :info is done on a constructor?  For instance ':info Nothing'
currently just prints:

  -- Nothing is a data constructor
  Nothing :: forall a. Maybe a

but this really isn't any more information than I get out of ':t
Nothing'.  It might be nice if it also printed the results of ':info
Maybe', so I could see the other constructors.  I've run into this many
times, most recently when using hSeek, I had code that used hSeek with
AbsoluteSeek, and I wanted SeekFromEnd...in order to find this out, I had
to either look in the docs (slow), or do two :infos, first on AbsoluteSeek
and then on SeekMode...

I'm sure opinions differ on this, though...

--
Hal Daume III

 "Computer science is no more about computers    | hdaume@isi.edu
  than astronomy is about telescopes." -Dijkstra | www.isi.edu/~hdaume

On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Simon Marlow wrote:

> > Ah...but if the fixity is not explicitly specified (and thus 
> > defaults to
> > infixl 9), this isn't printed, which is what was catching 
> > me...it seems it
> > should be (or perhaps say "infixl 9 (default)")?
> 
> But every variable has a fixity, including normal identifiers... should
> we report the default fixity for those too?
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Simon
>