Remi Turk wrote:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 01:31:24PM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
Remi Turk wrote:
On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 12:39:03AM -0500, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On 2009 Feb 5, at 5:49, Remi Turk wrote:
SPJ agreed with the idea itself, but suggested an alternative set of commands:
:info Show -- See class definition only :instances Show -- See instances of Show (...) However, it would make ":i" ambiguous, which is rather sad. :class Show -- unique prefix :cl, already many such collisions :instance Show That could work, but then how to get information about types as opposed to classes? Its not in the above example, but "Show" actually stands for an arbitrary typeclass _or type_.
However, as igloo pointed out on the ticket, abbreviations don't actually have to be unique:
"For example, :b means :break even though we also have :back, :browse and :browse!. " [1]
That would personally lead me to prefer the :info/:instances combo, with :i as an abbreviation of :info. My vote would be:
:info class Show :info type Show :info instance Show
where
:info Show
displays information about everything called "Show"
I know that classes and types share the same namespace currently, but it might not always be so.
Sounds good in principle, and has the advantage of being 100% backward compatible, but ":i class Show" for the common case (ahum, _my_ common case at least ;) still seems rather verbose, so how to abbreviate that?
How about a macro? :def ic return . (":info class " ++) Cheers, Simon