[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: wl-pprint-text 1.0.0.0

And lo, the people of Haskell hath declared that the text [1] library was to be the One True Way of dealing with textual data (unless, of course, you're annoyed about it using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8). And yet there was much sadness in the land, for there was no pretty-printing library available to produce said Text values, meaning that it was difficult for supplicants to produce the formatting their form of praise required. A voice then spake: make ye a new pretty-printing library aimed specifically for Text values. But thou shall not use the API from pretty [2], as it is rather limited. Instead, the design of wl-pprint [3] looks Real Good! It has more combinators available, can neatly deal with wrapping lists, and also has support for producing output for both humans and the machines that serve us so well! Thus were mighty energies aimed at producing such a library. Many were the hour at which toil was spent on this task, but at long last the task was completed. Yet great evil (i.e. programmer laziness) befell the great task, and it lay hidden for many a moon. However, with much effort the project was recovered, and is now available for all! [4] Some changes were regrettably required to achieve this task. The most important of which was that it was discovered that wl-pprint may not be as perfect as all that, in that documents of no content were treated poorly. However, spects of the pretty package were able to redeem themselves by supplying the necessary functionality. However, the great task was able to extend upon that which was there before, by invoking the almighty powers of the Monad. TL;DR: wl-pprint-text is a pretty-printing package for lazy Text values based upon the API of wl-pprint. It however deals with the nil document better than wl-pprint does, and also has a version where all the comibnators are lifted into a Monad, primarily so that it can be used within a State Monad. [1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/text [2]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pretty [3]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/wl-pprint [4]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/wl-pprint-text -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com