Change describe contract

[juliadata]

Change describe contract

[nalimilan]

Maybe we could change describe(x) to return an object that supports show, but keep describe(io, x) = show(io, describe(x)) to limit breakage? How likely is it that somebody would rely on describe(x) printing the result directly to stdout, without ever printing the resulting object (which is currently nothing)?

[bkamins]

I agree that having describe(x) return nothing is not useful at all and kind of anti-pattern. I think this kind of behavior should be restricted to functions like print, show etc. whose only purpose is printing things (and I would not extend this list with describe).