Is there any way that you can turn an arbitrary Haskell value into a string? I rephrase: There *is* a way to turn arbitrary values into strings. I know there is, because the GHCi debugger *does* it. The question is, does anybody know of an /easy/ way to do this? Basically, I'm writing a mutable container implementation. It can hold any type of data, but it would massively aid debugging if I could actually print out what's in it. On the other hand, I don't want to alter the entire program to have Show constraints everywhere just so I can print out some debug traces (and then alter everything back again afterwards once I'm done debugging). Anybody know of a way to do this? (As it happens, the values I'm testing with are all Showable anyway, but the type checker doesn't know that...)