Show data more nicely in the Julia REPL
Julia has a very sophisticated infrastructure for displaying data, but I find its output in the REPL ... unsatisfying. Too often, typing show(x) either returns too little information, or too much information in a lengthy, near-incomprehensible string.
show(x) should show a salient textual representation or overview of x.
Such a representation should indicate the type of x, its structure, and the data that comprises it.
- Specialized formatting may be used to implicitly indicate the type of
x, e.g.[ ]indicates an array,( )indicates a tuple, etc. - The structure of
xis shown up to some reasonable depth. The amount of detail shown may decrease with nesting depth. - Large containers may be summarized by their initial and final elements.
Their are different contexts:
- for non-types: Top level, element of a composite, parameter of a type (if a simple type)
- for types: Top level, type info for a value, parameter of a type
This is all handled through two context parameters:
- :depth - An integer denoting the level of structural nesting. Defaults to 0.
- :max_depth - The maximum depth of structure to show.
- :show_typeinfo (bool) - Whether or not to show type info