[Haskell-cafe] Advice for clean code.

[Felipe Lessa]

On Dec 4, 2007 1:28 AM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
>     -- How to display results
>     instance Show Action where
>         show MoveOutOfBounds    = "Sorry you can't move in that direction."
>         show (MoveBadTerrain a) = case a of
>                                   Wall      -> "You walk into a wall."
>                                   Tree      -> "There is a tree in the way."
>                                   otherwise -> "You can't move there."
>         show MoveOk             = "Good move."

I always thought show was meant for returning a String that could be
used to recreate the original data if you copy-pasted it in your code
or if you used read (i.e. read . show == id). Reading the
documentation more carefully, I see that [1] says that this property
holds for *derived* instances, and says nothing about it in the
general case.

So, what's the deal here? May I use Show for anything without breaking
conventions? And how about Read?

Thanks!

[1] http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-3.0.0.0/Prelude.html#t%3AShow

-- 
Felipe.