On 9/20/07, Simon Peyton-Jones
Hmm. Currently GHCi prints the value of the *variable* that you bind. For example
Just x <- foo 4
will print the value of x, *not* the value of (Just x). So if two variables are bound, there'd be two values to print.
But an alternative behaviour would be to print the value of the LHS, constructors and all. That is in the above example, print Just <value of x> Then if there were two values, for example (x,Just y) <- bar 5 then it'd print ( <value of x>, Just <value of y> )
That would be a change from current behaviour, but it'd look identical when the LHS was a simple variable (the wildly common case), and it'd do something useful when multiple variables are bound.
I think a more consistent behavior would be to not print the LHS at all. If you wanted to print the result of the computation you could just do: Prelude> bar 5 or, if you also wanted bound variables afterwards: Prelude> (x, Just y) <- bar 5 Prelude> (x, Just y) Perhaps this is my imperative background speaking, but I don't see much difference at the GHCi prompt between these two: Prelude> let x = 5 Prelude> x <- return 5 I think they should have the same behavior by default; otherwise it's just confusing to the new user. For reference, I ran into this problem while playing around on the ICFP contest problem, and I became quite frustrated trying to do dna <- Data.ByteString.Char8.readFile "endo.dna" and having to wait a few minutes for the console to catch up while using GHCi as a simple interactive debugger. The best argument I can think of for changing the default value of that option is this: The workaround for printing the value of bound variables, if the default is to not print and you don't know the options, is simple: just type the bound variable in as an expression afterwards. On the other hand, there is no workaround to not print the value of bound variables, if you don't know about the existence of that option. In my case, I did do a cursory look to find an option to change this behavior, but I missed it in the documentation. -- ryan