[luca_ciciriello@hotmail.com: Re: [Haskell-beginners] reflection]

[Brent Yorgey]

Well, there are a few things I could suggest for you to look at:

  * the hint package [1] for runtime Haskell interpretation
  * look at xmonad [2] for an example of a program which recompiles and reloads itself on the fly
  * the haskell-src-exts library [3] for a full-featured Haskell parser/pretty printer

There is no way to actually inspect and modify the structure of a
running Haskell program in memory; it is simply not stored in a format
which would let you do this (it is highly optimized and compiled).
However, using the above tools I imagine you should be able to
accomplish what you want.

-Brent

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hint
[2] http://xmonad.org/
[3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-src-exts

----- Forwarded message from Luca Ciciriello <luca_ciciriello at hotmail.com> -----

From: Luca Ciciriello <luca_ciciriello at hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 18:20:13 +0100
To: Brent Yorgey <byorgey at seas.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] reflection

My need is to have a program that at run-time should be able to read itself and eventually modify itself. I've used this reflection in Common LISP.
I don't know if this is possible in Haskell using GHC or GHCi (perhaps there are more chances inside the eval-loop of GHCi).

Thanks anyway for the answer.

Luca.


On Jan 5, 2010, at 5:58 PM, Brent Yorgey wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 09:43:21AM +0100, Luca Ciciriello wrote:
>> Hi.
>> Someone has performed or know how to use reflection in Haskell?
>> I've found something on google, but that stuff seems to me very confusing.
> 
> It depends what you mean by "reflection".  Can you give an example of
> the sorts of things you'd like to do?  Generally speaking, Haskell
> doesn't support "reflection" in the same way as many other languages
> do, but there are usually idiomatic ways to accomplish the same things
> you would use reflection for.
> 
> -Brent
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> Beginners at haskell.org
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> 



----- End forwarded message -----