There is something strange about the Haskell'98 Numeric library, which I think could be considered a bug of sorts. There are functions

readDec, readOct, readHex :: (Integral a) => ReadS a

which read an integer from a string in base 10, 8, or 16, but there are no corresponding show functions to convert an integer to a string using base 8 or 16. The sole function given is

showInt :: (Integral a) => a -> ShowS

which shows a number in base 10 only. I think you'll agree that it is odd that you can read a certain number format but cannot show it?

Yes indeed. GHC and Hugs have showHex, showOct, showBin and showIntAtBase in NumExts: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/set/sec-numexts.html Cheers, Simon