[Haskell-cafe] Re: Is it possible to read existential types?

[Chung-chieh Shan]

S. Alexander Jacobson <alex at alexjacobson.com> wrote in article <Pine.WNT.4.53.0404260740320.2516 at philo> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:
> Is is possible to read/show an existentially typed
> list?
> 
> Would it be possible if, instead of using
> read/show, I defined some variant that relies on
> the typeof/typeable infrastructure?  Is there a
> way to read in a typename for use in coercing a
> read?

Dylan Thurston and I encountered this problem a while ago.  Show is
easy: just use a type like "exists a. Show a => ...".  Read is hard,
because one needs to get the Read dictionary from somewhere, and
the dynamic typing facility in Haskell does not include type-class
constraint reduction at runtime.  The best solution we came up with was
to replace the existentially typed list with a list of string-string
pairs, where the first string names the type and the second string names
the value.  The call to "read" is only done at lookup time, not at
file-reading time.

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