[GROOVY-7568] Groovysh output should be more safe, verbose about types and String output

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: Groovysh
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Thibault Kruse
• Created: 28/Aug/15 11:39
• Updated: 28/Aug/17 05:14

Description

The output of buffer evaluation results in Groovy hides a lot of useful information from the user.

In particular Strings are printed without surrounding quotes, collections are printed without telling whether they are Lists, Maps, Sets, or Ranges. Ranges are printed fully as lists (which can be unnecessarily long).

An implementation is almost done at https://github.com/tkruse/incubator-groovy/tree/pretty

Both Python and Ruby shells follow the approach of printing strings as code-strings (with quotes and escaping).

The downside or more information is that this output could be regarded as "too noisy".