Type rewriting?

[tpolecat]

@milessabin asked if types could be rewritten ... perhaps by removing prefixes like shapeless. or scalaz. and then rewriting selected type constructors like (:: and \/) in infix form. Would be nice if this could be done without rewriting the output stream, but so far IMain has been immune to hacking attempts. Worth another look.

[tpolecat]

It also occurs to me that this might be a better contribution to Scala itself since most of us would like to have this behavior for real in the REPL.

[tpolecat]

Might be possible via some kind of integration with Ammonite?

[lihaoyi]

Ammonite already does this... feel free to use it, or just grab the code to vendor in your own projects. It's like one file:

https://github.com/lihaoyi/Ammonite/blob/master/repl/src/main/scala-2.11/ammonite/repl/frontend/TPrintImpl.scala#L1

• some autogenerated thing to TPrint functions and some interfaces so 2.10.x can fall back to .toString

[ryan-williams]

really interested in this feature, going to do some digging around ammonite with an eye toward whether a tut integration is possible

any more recent context on the state/plausibility of this is welcome!

my immediate use-case is overhauling the docs on hammerlab/iterators, where a lot of examples' return-values' toString is non-empty iterator 😆

vaguely related is also a ToLines type-class I wrote/use, and customizable auto-derivations for it