I vote for number 3 as well. As Paul already noted, his MA module already does something similar to this and I've found that very handy while working interactively. On Tue, 2002-06-11 at 11:43, Perry Greenfield wrote:

... Yet on the other hand, it is undeniably convenient to use repr (by typing a variable) for small arrays interactively rather than using a print statement. This leads to 3 possible proposals for handling repr:

1) Do what is done now, always print a string that when eval'ed will recreate the array.

2) Only give summary information for the array regardless of its size.

3) Print the array if it has fewer than THRESHOLD number of elements, otherwise print a summary. THRESHOLD may be adjusted by the user.

...