Re: FW: showing Handle is impure

I've changed GHC's implementation so that it now displays just the filename from the Handle (this is the the only immutable part of the Handle). This raises another question though: should there be an IO operation for displaying the more interesting parts of a Handle? I propose:

System.IO.hShow :: Handle -> IO String

Sounds good. I'm a little surprised that there always is a filename though - I thought (but haven't bothered to check) that Handles were used for anything that can contain a file descriptor: files, pipes, network connections, etc. No big deal but what is the output in these cases? (The file descriptor number suggests itself - immutable though not necessarily unique.) -- Alastair