RE: Why are there no Show instances for internal types

| > >- Is there a reason that there are no derived 'Show' instances for | > >most types? | > | > As Richard mentioned, we don't derive Show due to code size and | compilation time concerns. | > Show in particular is rather expensive to derive and seeing as we | already have Outputable I don't it would make sense to derive it by | default. | | Show and Outputable have very different goals though. Really? What's wrong with using Outputable, plus, as Joachim says, showSDocUnsafe . ppr :: Outputable a => a -> String Maybe you want to really really see the precise data constructors used. But for the most part the Outputable instance tells you that, but much more legibly. Simon