[Haskell-cafe] Type-class conditional behavior

[Nicholas Tung]

Dear all,

    I'd like to write a function "maybeShow :: a -> Maybe String", which
runs "show" if its argument is of class Show.

    The context and motivation for this are as follows. I have a GADT type
which encapsulates abstract-value computation (or constants or error codes),
a snippet of which is below.

data AV t where
    AVLeft :: AV a -> AV (Either a b)

    This is used to implement an arrow transformer, and due to Arrows
mapping all Haskell functions, I cannot put some kind of qualification on
the constructor, like "AVLeft :: Show a => ...".

    Of course any replies are welcome, but I do need something implemented
and stable. If there are GHC-compatible hacks, even an "unsafeShow :: a ->
String", that'd be great. I'd also prefer not to branch on all types which
could possibly be maybeShow's argument.



    (Concretely, if I have "newtype AVFunctor a b c = AVF (a (AV b) (AV
c))", then the Arrow class declaration forces all types, c.f. variable b, to
be potential variables of type AV),

class (Category a) => Arrow a where
  arr :: (b -> c) -> a b c


Thanks very much,
Nicholas — https://ntung.com — CS major @ UC Berkeley

p.s. I posted this question on StackOverflow if you care to get brownie
points there, http://goo.gl/PrmYW

p.s. 2 -- if there is a general "dump var" function in ghci, which does more
than ":info", I'd love to know :)
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