On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 03:42:40PM -0600, Dave Rolsky wrote: > I think the problem is that Data::Dumper has historically had two > orthogonal uses. One was serializing data structures for persistence, ala > Storable, and the other was for debugging. > > Nowadays, I'm guessing most people use Storable for the first, and so it's > probably used more for debugging. But just dumping the structure as is > may not be ideal for debugging.
This dichotomy is unfortunate. It's quite nice to have a readable serialized format, when space is not important. However, you must use Data::Dumper _very_ carefully to get reliable serialization, and when I suggested that it be made easier, people said "Data::Dumper is for pretty-printing, use Storable". Meanwhile, Data::Dumper is much more verbose than a pretty-printer needs to be. So it's sort of stuck in no-man's land. > So I suspect what we really need is something like Data::DebugDumper or > something like that, which is _only_ used for debugging. Is there already > something on CPAN that might be suitable for this? Dumpvalue is what the debugger uses (actually, I think it's a copy of it :-/), so that's the natural choice. It is much more concise and readable than Data::Dumper, IMO. Andrew
