On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Roman Leshchinskiy
So it seems that (1) people have very different requirements and (2) the Show instance only really matters for debugging in ghci. Here is a thought. What if ghci allowed Show instances to be overridden dynamically? So you could put your preferred Show instance for Vector Word8 in you .ghci file and ghci would use that when displaying stuff (but not when actually evaluating things). Would that solve most of the problems without messing with vector's Show instances?
I actually think it's more than just GHCi. A lot of the time when debugging some code, I'll litter it with "print"s to see what's going on. For me, I'd rather change the actual Show instance. It might make sense to try and pursue something like what you're suggesting, but I think the default Show (Vector Word8) should be the one most useful, most of the time, and I think the general consensus seems to be the current ByteString instance fits that role. Michael