John Hughes's and Simon Peyton Jones's Pretty Printer Combinators

Based on The Design of a Pretty-printing Library in Advanced Functional Programming, Johan Jeuring and Erik Meijer (eds), LNCS 925 http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/pretty.ps

Heavily modified by Simon Peyton Jones, Dec 96

A document of height 1 containing a literal string. text satisfies the following laws:

• text s <> text t = text (s++t)

• text "" <> x = x, if x non-empty

The side condition on the last law is necessary because text "" has height 1, while empty has no height.

int n = text (show n)

integer n = text (show n)

float n = text (show n)

double n = text (show n)

rational n = text (show n)

Above, except that if the last line of the first argument stops at least one position before the first line of the second begins, these two lines are overlapped. For example:

    text "hi" $$ nest 5 (text "there")

lays out as

    hi   there

rather than

    hi
         there

$$ is associative, with identity empty, and also satisfies

• (x $$ y) <> z = x $$ (y <> z), if y non-empty.

Nest (or indent) a document by a given number of positions (which may also be negative). nest satisfies the laws:

• nest 0 x = x

• nest k (nest k' x) = nest (k+k') x

• nest k (x <> y) = nest k z <> nest k y

• nest k (x $$ y) = nest k x $$ nest k y

• nest k empty = empty

• x <> nest k y = x <> y, if x non-empty

The side condition on the last law is needed because empty is a left identity for <>.

hang d1 n d2 = sep [d1, nest n d2]

punctuate p [d1, ... dn] = [d1 <> p, d2 <> p, ... dn-1 <> p, dn]