Re: [Haskell-cafe] Bikeshedding request for GHCi's :type

On Mon, May 2, 2016, at 13:39, Richard Eisenberg wrote:

On May 2, 2016, at 4:36 PM, Eric Seidel wrote:

...

Also, I'd suggest making (1) and (2) optional flags for :type rather than new top-level commands. The shared prefix already suggests a common purpose, printing out the type of something, so why not make it even clearer that (1) and (2) are just specializations (heh) of :type?

Others have echoed this and I'm open to the idea. But I, personally, dislike this. All three commands are useful, and I expect I'll want to frequently interleave which one I want during a GHCi session. Controlling via a flag makes this awkward.

But that's just my 2¢.

Ah, I was talking about a different kind of flag this time. Instead of a GHCi-level flag (or maybe in addition to..), I was thinking about a flag specifically associated with an invocation of :type, e.g. ghci> :type length Foldable t => t a -> Int ghci> :type -default length [a] -> Int It's very nitpicky, I know, but I think the added grouping would be nice, in particular w.r.t. the output of :help. Eric