[MLton] cvs commit: major improvements to -show-basis

[Stephen Weeks]

> I was going to suggest replacing "?" with "<this>", but that's a
> little notationally heavy.  One argument for it is that the SML/NJ
> pretty-printer has got me hooked on thinking that "?" means a
> shadowed/out-of-scope structure.

I feel the same.  About the only other prefix that looks reasonable to
me is "_.", or maybe even "_".  But I think "?." is better.

> BTW, I was wondering if the new front-end can keep tycons straight enough
> that we don't need the {isChar: bool} flag for pretty-printing primitive
> tycons.  That is, if we opaquely match Char early enough, will everything
> for a user's program necessarily talk about char and not word8.

Are you referring to the isChar in PRIM_TYCONS

      val layoutApp:
	 tycon * (Layout.t * {isChar: bool, needsParen: bool}) vector
	 -> Layout.t * {isChar: bool, needsParen: bool}

If so, I don't see how we can get rid of it.  It is used to layout
"char vector" as "string".  When laying out the vector type, there
isn't enough information in the Layout.t argument to know whether we
have a char vector or some other vector.