Pretty printing
Pretty printing is the formatted rendering of structured information as human-readable text through layout, spacing, indentation, and line breaks.
Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms
Pretty printing is the automated formatting of source code to produce a readable layout under spacing and indentation constraints.
- How it is used
- Formats source code for consistent readability, structural indentation, bounded line width, and reduced vertical clutter.
- How deep it goes
- Descends from layout goals to parse-tree transformation, doc graphs, greedy rendering, explicit stacks, and visitor-based organization.
- Examples
- Uses irregularly spaced expressions, conditional statements, comments, delimited comments, and immutable C# expression-tree records.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch as a simplified, nonrecursive formatter with separate parse-tree, doc, rendering, and visitor layers.
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Clojure: The Essential Reference
Pretty printing is the generation of human-readable textual representations with structured layout and spacing.
- How it is used
- Improves REPL readability, source-code presentation, tabular display, and controlled output for large or nested values.
- How deep it goes
- Explains entry points, dispatch, dynamic controls, truncation, margins, streams, bases, and tables, without detailing printer internals.
- Examples
- Uses nested maps and collections, RSS XML data, Clojure forms, macroexpansion, numeric bases, output files, and printed tables.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure clojure.pprint to display data, format code, constrain output, write streams, and render tables.
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Learn Haskell by Example
Pretty printing is the rendering of structured information in a human-readable textual format.
- How it is used
- Uses pretty printing to render CSV data for users and add readable column summaries.
- How deep it goes
- Defines a PrettyCsv model and rendering interface, but leaves conversion, summaries, and formatting algorithms as exercises.
- Examples
- Uses PrettyCsv fields and fromCsv, withSummaries, pretty, and prettyText as concrete design examples.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch by converting Csv to PrettyCsv, adding summaries, and implementing textual rendering.
Read how Learn Haskell by Example explains pretty printing →
Related concepts
- formatterequivalent to · A formatter is a software tool that automatically transforms source code into a consistent textual layout according to specified formatting rules.
- parse treeuses · A parse tree is a hierarchical representation of the syntactic structure derived by parsing an expression, program, or structured document.
- greedy algorithmuses · A greedy algorithm builds a solution incrementally by choosing the locally best available option at each step, without generally accounting for all future consequences or revising prior choices.
- Documentproduced by · A discrete representation of information, such as content or a structured record, optionally accompanied by metadata.
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