[Haskell-cafe] GHC wish

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Christophe,

Wednesday, May 24, 2006, 3:05:53 AM, you wrote:
> I recently stumbled upon something that I think should be added to the
> GHC wishlist. Not knowing where to put it, I will put it here. As there
> is deriving(Show) for most basic data types, wouldn't it be possible to
> have something similar but then deriving(Pretty). When printing ASTs it
> could make it much easier to look at the output.

believe you or not, but that is a pretty standard technique
called generic programming. i've seen 7 tools to do it (including
DrIFT) and moreover, 3 of them are included in GHC.

one of these GHC-bundled tools is Template Haskell. you can see it's
description at
http://haskell.org/hawiki/TemplateHaskell
http://haskell.org/hawiki/TemplateHaskellTutorial
http://freearc.narod.ru/th.htm
http://freearc.narod.ru/thdoc.htm

my library http://freearc.narod.ru/Streams.tar.gz contains module
Data/AltBinary/TH.hs that you can use as the starting point - it
derives instances for Binary class. File "Examples/AltBinary/DeriveBinary.hs"
contains example of it's usage. use "-ddump-splices" GHC option when
compiling example to see actual code generated

i also attached here simple module that generates "Show" instances using TH

and last - in my feeling, DrIFT is simpler to use, TH is really
head-breaking thing. on the other side, by using TH you will not rely
on any external tools and special preprocessing. on the third side ;)
TH works only with GHC while DrIFT is compatible with any Haskell
compiler. decision is up to you

anyway, please share your code - it is rather common task and i wonder
why noone still implemented this


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