This is perhaps a continuation along thread of similarity between debuggers and a interactive shells.

In writing Devel::Trepan, it was important to find a good package to display evaluation results. There are a lot of packages out there. I started out with Data::Dumper which is what Devel::REPL uses by default. I thought I might be ahead of the curve here because perl5db uses dumpvar.pl which comes with Perl5.

Then I came across Data::Dumper::Perltidy, which I thought might be a little nicer. And most recently I see Data::Print which colorizes output and sort hash keys. There is a Data::Print plugin for Devel::REPL. In Devel::Trepan, I just check to see if the module is there and if so offer a way inside the debugger of selecting that mode of output.

Do folks here have comments on the different formatters available? Is it jarring that perl5db "x" output is different than say Devel::REPL (and now Devel::Trepan) output? I wonder how important it is even to allow choice and customization of data output?

(It is useful and important to me to have output look nice and useable, but I worry that how I like to see the output is not the way others may want it.)