Availability of Coercible Instances at TH Runtime

[Travis Whitaker]

A workaround that's suitable for what I'm after is defining a class like
this for some fixed T.

instance (Coercible a T) => C a

I'm curious what it'd take to add a qReifyCoercible method; does the
renamer know anything about Coercible?

Thanks,
Travis

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 11:01 AM, Richard Eisenberg <rae at cs.brynmawr.edu>
wrote:

> I don't think there's an easy way to do this. We could imagine extending
> Quasi to have a method to check for coercibility, but I don't think there's
> a way to do this in the current TH API. Sorry!
>
> Richard
>
> On May 4, 2018, at 3:44 AM, Travis Whitaker <pi.boy.travis at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Given that Coercible instances are Deeply Magical, perhaps I'm being a bit
> naive here, but I recently tried to write a TH function that can check if
> one type is a newtype of another (or a newtype of a newtype of another,
> etc).
>
> coercibleToFrom :: Type -> Type -> Q Bool
> coercibleToFrom tx ty = (&&) <$> isInstance ''Coercible [tx, ty]
>                              <*> isInstance ''Coercible [ty, tx]
>
> If this worked as I'd hoped, I'm almost certain checking reflexively is
> redundant. However, I can't seem to get reifyInstances to ever return an
> InstanceDec for a Coercible instance. Given that these instances are
> generated on the fly by the typechecker, there's no way to make them
> available at TH runtime, correct? And, given that, is there an easy way to
> find out with TH whether not I'll be able to use coerce without taking all
> the Decs apart to hunt for NewtypeD?
>
> Travis
>
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