Astounding how so many languages and programmers don't make the clear distinction between "debug string", "canonical string", "human readable string", etc. Ther

Astounding how so many languages and programmers don't make the clear distinction between "debug string", "canonical string", "human readable string", etc. There is no such thing as a totally generic "to string" function for any nontrivial program. The approach I'm most a fan of is functional languages where everything has a fixed canonical string representation (even cooler when you can convert the string directly back to code), and everything else you must explicitly create a function for.