Hi Richard, Sorry for all of the confusion, it seems the docs do indeed need some love! On Sun, Dec 6, 2015, at 20:56, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
That looks like exactly what I want. Thanks.
There remain two mysteries: - I thought that CallStacks were a new feature that would come with GHC 8.0. Yet it seems the datatype is present in base-4.8.x. Even though the docs even say (wrongly, evidently) that it's in base since 4.9.
They were originally merged into 7.11, but were backported to the official 7.10.2 release due to popular demand. It appears the @since annotation wasn't updated correspondingly.
- That function seems missing in HEAD. Or maybe it moved. A little searching says it *did* move, to GHC.Exception.
In HEAD we are now using CallStacks for error and undefined, which was not the case for the 7.10.2 release. This means the type needs to be defined much earlier in base, before we even have enough functionality to write a sensible formatter. showCallStack currently lives in GHC.Exception because that's where it's used, but that's not a good reason... I'll take another look at moving it back to GHC.Stack.
Well, my problem is solved. But I think the documentation needs a pass here. And is there a reason not to have a Show instance?
I usually only use compiler-derived Show instances so that Read automatically works, as well as some nice formatting libraries like http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pretty-show for debugging. For pretty-printing like showCallStack I prefer a standalone function or a separate type-class. If the name "showCallStack" suggests the compiler-derived output, we could change it to something like "prettyCallStack" or "formatCallStack", I don't have a strong opinion there. Thanks for the comments! Eric