[Haskell-cafe] "desactivate" my Show instance implementations temporarily

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

On 22 April 2012 19:55, TP <paratribulations at free.fr> wrote:
> On Sunday 22 April 2012 19:37:19 Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
>
>> Is there any particular reason you're *not* using the defaults?
>
> This is a good question which I have asked myself. I have searched about the
> topic, and found that:
>
> http://blog.romanandreg.com/post/13545420287/haskells-show-and-pretty-
> printing-bad-practice
>
> So, according to this address, Show implementation should be used with Read so
> as to have show.read equal to identity: this is the only "good practice
> requirement".
>
> In my case, I use Show to print mathematical expressions, but it is not
> strictly pretty printing (not over several lines as in classical Computer
> Algebra Sytems). Why not using my own Show implementation to do that?

For exactly the same reason you're discovering: Show/Read exist for debugging.

Show and Read are meant to produce/read valid Haskell code (modulo
[qualified] imports) so that you can work out what code is going wrong
(and coincidentally used as a quick`n`dirty serialisation method).

The term "pretty-printing" is meant in regards to producing
_human-readable_ versions of your data (though the pretty-printing
libraries can also be used to produce code formatted for some other
tool to parse, etc.).  Show/Read happen to be auto-derivable classes
that implement one such form of pretty-printing (i.e. "printing"
values that look like the actual source code that represents them).

Let me provide you with a personal anecdote: when I took over
maintaining the graphviz library, it was still using the Show class
for printing (but a proper parser library for parsing), and it was
working with the limited functionality it had.  However, whenever I
tried to do something new, I found problems:

* Existing Show instances meant that it was very difficult to extend
what the library could represent and then print properly.

* As you've found, it can then be a PITA to debug because you have no
idea what the internal values actually are.

In the end, I eventually wrote a custom pretty-printing class (the
existing pretty-printing classes had instances that didn't suit, just
like Show) and it's worked a lot better since.

The only time it's valid to override the default Show/Read instances
is when the constructors aren't exported (e.g. Data.Map), but even
then it should be valid Haskell (if you ignore imports, etc.).

So leave Show/Read as they are, and write a custom function[s] that
does the actual pretty-printing you want.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com