showrepresent

Showrepresent is a term used in software design and documentation to denote a mechanism that produces a human-readable representation of a data object or state for display, debugging, or teaching. It encompasses both textual representations and graphical visualizations, and may be implemented as a function, method, or feature of a development environment.

In practice, a showrepresent facility maps a concrete object to a representation that exposes its structure, value, and relationships. It can support multiple formats ranging from concise inline strings to detailed trees or diagrams. Implementations often allow overriding or customizing representations for specific types to preserve important invariants or to avoid exposing sensitive data.

Typical mechanisms include pretty-printers, serializers, or visualization pipelines. A library might provide a canonical representation for core types and plug-in hooks for user-defined types. In interactive environments, showrepresent can be invoked automatically to display objects in the inspector.

Applications span debugging, documentation, teaching, and data exploration. In programming languages, similar concepts appear as repr, str, toString, or print methods; showrepresent can be thought of as a higher-level abstraction that emphasizes the display of the object's representation rather than its internal state.

Limitations include performance cost, risk of information overload, and potential leakage of sensitive data if not carefully controlled. The usefulness depends on the consistency and completeness of representations.

See also: pretty-printer, serialization, visualization, debugging, reflection.