[m-rev.] for review: improvementstopprintinterface

[Mark Brown]

On 06-May-2002, Ralph Becket <rafe at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> Estimated hours taken: 2
> Branches: main
> 
> Extended the interface to pprint to reduce the syntactic burden of
> constructing docs by introducing the doc/1 type class and the ++/2
> doc instance concatenation operator.
> 
> NEWS:
> 	Mentioned the new changes.
> 
> library/pprint.m:
> 	Added the doc/1 typeclass.
> 	Made docs, strings, chars, ints and floats instances of doc/1.
> 	Added the ++/2 operator which is analogous to `<>`/2, but operates
> 	on doc/1 instances.
> 	Used the new facilities to simplify the various doc construction
> 	combinators provided by pprint.

This changes to the code are fine.  However, I have a few suggestions
for the documentation:
	- It would probably be good to change the examples at the top
	  of the module to use the new parts of the interface.
	- You might also document the addition of the typeclass in the
	  "changes" part of the documentation.
	- Is there an expectation that users would usually add all the
	  types they wish to print as instances of the typeclass?  This
	  would be good, because they could then write a function that
	  converts, say, map(K, V) into doc where K and V are constrained
	  by doc, without necessarily resorting to the generic to_doc
	  function.  You could then make map/2 an instance of doc.  If
	  this is the expectation, then I suggest adding examples of this
	  to the documentation.

Feel free to address this third point in a separate change.

Cheers,
Mark.

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