Hi > unrestricted polymorphic was mainly a debugging problem. I wondered if the > better solution would have been to provide an 'unsafeSeq' which has no type > restriction but must be absent from production code just like 'trace'.
That would be very neat! > type constraints accordingly. (Analogously there could be an unsafeShow that > allows showing offending values in an 'error' without adding a Show > constraint to the type signature.) Ideally, unsafeShow could also show types as they are underneath, not as a pretty-printing Show might show them. I have often wanted to overload Show to print things in a readable way, but to have a showRaw which shows things as they are, for debugging purposes. I have even written such code for Yhc: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/yhc/snapshot/docs/Yhc-Core-ShowRaw.html I think unsafeShow is a fantastic idea - and would be much more useful to me than unsafeSeq - plus is a non-breaking change. I think Hugs already has 90% of the code to support this, and GHCi's debugger I think has a fair chunk of it, so it could be added given not too much work. Thanks Neil _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe