[jira] [Created] (GROOVY-8431) toDebugString method as a core concept

["mgroovy (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

mgroovy created GROOVY-8431:
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             Summary: toDebugString method as a core concept
                 Key: GROOVY-8431
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GROOVY-8431
             Project: Groovy
          Issue Type: Proposal
          Components: GEP, groovy-jdk
    Affects Versions: 3.x, 2.5.x
            Reporter: mgroovy


* Groovy should introduce a toDebugString method as a core concept, to separate debug to-string-conversion semantics from heavily oversubscribed standard Java Object#toString.
* The power of this feature as a core concept lies in support to create
## Easy to use, human readable debug output of any object
## Creating debug output of objects owned by other objects (i.e. hierarchical debug output)
* Adding this feature should be relatively simple, the challenge is to decide what features/parameters toDebugString should have, because this will be hard to change once the feature has been introduced.   
* The default implementation could
## Call the Java default Object#toString method
## Automatically create a reflection based output (performance will probably be bad for this, so it might be better to enable this behavior through an annotation)
## Returns something along the line of getClass().simpleName + '@' + System.identityHashcode(this) (though Object#toString is probably more useful)
## Fall back to the class' toString method (although in most cases it's most likely not what the user wants/expects)
* An extension would be for an overloaded toDebugString to take an indentationLevel and indentationString parameter:
{code}String toDebugString(int indentationLevel, String indentationString = '\t'){code}
** Implementations would be expected to indent the resulting String accordingly, which is very helpful for
### Complex objects which require a multi-line output to make sense of them in a debug log
### Outputting inner objects (e.g. a collection) owned by an object
** Groovy default implementation could be, to indent the result of calling toDebugString(), by scanning for newline sequences in the returned string
* Questions:
## Is there a better name than the (relatively long) "toDebugString" ?
*** toDebugString was suggested, since it is easy to discover, and its purpose should immediately clear
## Should the return type of toDebugString be GString instead of String ?
*** This would allow for Groovy to process the objects embedded in the GString differently
*** Having an additional GString toDebugGString() method might be an alternative
## Should there be additional parameters such as a terseness/verboseness parameter, which indicates how compact or verbose the generated debug string should be (implementations would be free to ignore this, of course) ?



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