Add simple Display class for showing-as-strict-Text

src/Text/Display.hs

@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+{- This file is part of Vervis.
+ -
+ - Written in 2016 by fr33domlover <fr33domlover@riseup.net>.
+ -
+ - ♡ Copying is an act of love. Please copy, reuse and share.
+ -
+ - The author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring
+ - rights to this software to the public domain worldwide. This software is
+ - distributed without any warranty.
+ -
+ - You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along
+ - with this software. If not, see
+ - <http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>.
+ -}
+
+-- | 'Show' is often used for human-friendly visualization of Haskell values,
+-- but there are problems with it:
+--
+-- 1. It's supposed to be used for generating text that can also be parsed back
+--    into a Haskell value, i.e. 'Read' instances should match the 'Show' ones
+-- 2. Auto-generated 'Show and 'Read' often doesn't result with the
+--    human-friendly display you want, and if you write a 'Show' instance
+--    manually, and you ever need a 'Read' one, you'll need to write it
+--    manually too
+-- 3. 'Show' uses 'String' while often you want to work with other string-like
+--    types, such as strict 'Text'
+-- 4. All the pretty printing tools are very structured and use 'String' too,
+--    while all I want is a simple value-to-text thing
+--
+-- I could generalize here and provide a generic 'Display' 2-param class that
+-- can be used with lazy Text and ByteString and any other target type and so
+-- on, but instead, at least for now, I'm filling just the missing piece I
+-- need: Frieldly display as strict 'Text'.
+module Text.Display
+    ( Display (..)
+    )
+where
+
+import Prelude
+
+import Data.Text (Text)
+
+class Display a where
+    display :: a -> Text

vervis.cabal

@@ -68,6 +68,7 @@ library
                        Formatting.CaseInsensitive
                        Network.SSH.Local
                        Text.Blaze.Local
+                       Text.Display
                        Text.FilePath.Local
                        Text.Jasmine.Local
                        Web.PathPieces.Local