magicDict

[Carter Schonwald]

This makes sense to me, and provides a good explanation  for why I mix up
the terms.

So usual parlance is reify brings stuff back down/ reflect bounces it up?

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 2:16 AM Spiwack, Arnaud <arnaud.spiwack at tweag.io>
wrote:

> While I do value consistency, let me pet-peeve for a minute here (sorry in
> advance Edward for the rant). The word “reify” comes from the latin “res”,
> which means object/thing. It should always mean something along the line of
> “making more concrete”. In normalisation by evaluation, for instance, you
> reify a semantic value as syntax (an object of the language of study), and
> you reflect values of the language into the semantic domain.
>
> To me, the reflection library uses the terms inconsistently. For instance
> you have the type ReifiedMonoid for the concrete type representing a
> monoid instance. This is, in my opinion, the right terminology. However, a
> ReifiedMonoid should be the product of reification, but in the reflection
> library it actually gets reify-d further. This doesn’t seem to work at
> the grammar level. I contend that the function should have been reflect
> all along: you reflect a concrete dictionary object into the nebulous,
> untouchable world of type class instances.
>
> It’s probably too late to fix the reflection library, hence me never
> complaining about it (in public :-) ). But I vote we don’t perpetuate this
> situation, and still call the function reflectDict.
> _______________________________________________
> ghc-devs mailing list
> ghc-devs at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20210423/ed1671d6/attachment.html>