Template Haskell crashes unexpectedly...

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Arie,

Monday, August 21, 2006, 7:08:31 PM, you wrote:

>>         getInfo :: Q Info
>>         getInfo = reify (mkName "Car")

>>             -- Crashes if I try to print out the info
>>             -- info <- runQ getInfo

> I seem to remember that 'reify' cannot be run in the IO monad.

oh, yes! runQ is just a way to test simple things, it's not a
full-featured Q monad emulator. reify should be called at compile-time
to get access to identifiers table

and it crashes just because no exception handler was installed

this is the appropriate part of TH library:

class Monad m => Quasi m where
  qNewName :: String -> m Name
  qReport  :: Bool -> String -> m ()
  qRecover :: m a -> m a -> m a
  qReify :: Name -> m Info
  qCurrentModule :: m String
  qRunIO :: IO a -> m a

Quasi class covers all operations of Q monad. It has two
implementations:

instance Quasi Q where
  qNewName        = newName
  qReport        = report
  qRecover       = recover 
  qReify         = reify
  qCurrentModule = currentModule
  qRunIO         = runIO

this instance work for code generated at compile-time by $(...) splices

and this instance used when you run computations in Q monad inside
your program, at run-time, using runQ operation:

instance Quasi IO where
  qNewName s = do { n <- readIORef counter
                 ; writeIORef counter (n+1)
                 ; return (mkNameU s n) }
  qReport True  msg = hPutStrLn stderr ("Template Haskell error: " ++ msg)
  qReport False msg = hPutStrLn stderr ("Template Haskell error: " ++ msg)
  qReify v       = badIO "reify"
  qCurrentModule = badIO "currentModule"
  qRecover a b   = badIO "recover"      -- Maybe we could fix this?
  qRunIO m = m
  
badIO :: String -> IO a
badIO op = do   { qReport True ("Can't do `" ++ op ++ "' in the IO monad")
                ; fail "Template Haskell failure" }

as you can see, it don't supports reification, recovery and
information about currently compiled module just because there is no
such information when program runs. and of course, you can't add new
fields or new functions at run-time. isntead typical technique is:

$(transform [d| data D = X {f::Int, g::String} |] )

where 'transform' parses declaration passed and generates something
like this

data D = X {unique::Int, f::Int, g::String}

of course, you can also use reification, it's a matter of taste
                


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com