[erlang-questions] proposal: pretty printing through polymorphism

[Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB)]

A while back, I hacked the Erlang shell in order to
allow custom pretty-printing:

http://ulf.wiger.net/weblog/2007/11/20/extending-the-erlang-shell-part-1/

You can find the code here:

svn co http://svn.ulf.wiger.net/ext_shell/trunk

The trunk is for R12B. See also

http://svn.ulf.wiger.net/ext_shell/branches/r11b/
http://svn.ulf.wiger.net/ext_shell/branches/r12b/

Please feel free to play around with it and propose
improvements.

BR,
Ulf W

Scott Parish skrev:
> Problem:
> 
> Right now pretty printing values shows the lowest layer data
> structures. This is ugly and usually not what an end user wants/needs
> to see. For instance:
> 
> 1> dict:store(color, red, dict:store(size, 5, dict:new())).
> {dict,2,
>       16,
>       16,
>       8,
>       80,
>       48,
>       {[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[]},
>       {{[],[],[[color|red]],[],[],[[size|5]],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[],[]}}}
> 
> Solution:
> 
> The proposed solution would take advantage of the type of polymorphism
> suggested in my prior email. Namely, there would be a function such as
> string:pretty_print/1 which would take a derived datastructure, use
> the record name to call RecordName:pretty_print/1. Things such as the
> shell or io:format could then use this interface to print truely
> pretty versions of derived types (if such is provided).
> 
> Side discussion:
> 
> Actually, a pretty_print would probably need to take more arguments
> then just the data structure; it would probably need to be passed
> information such as the width of the left margin and the wrap length.
> 
> Alternatively, instead of "pretty printing", a form could be returned
> which would represent how to reproduce the data structure. This would
> serve the dual purpose of being much easier for end users to read, as
> well as being immediately copy/paste-able. For an example of what this
> would look like, dict might return: "{dict, from_list, [[{color, red},
> {size, 5}]]}" for my earlier example. io:format (and friends) of
> course could then easily print this as "dict:from_list([{color, red},
> {size, 5}])".
> 
> Thoughts?
> sRp
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