[Haskell-cafe] haskell and reflection

[Don Stewart]

lgreg.meredith:
>    Haskellians,
> 
>    Am i wrong in my assessment that the vast majority of reflective machinery
>    is missing from Haskell? Specifically,
> 
>      * there is no runtime representation of type available for programmatic
>        representation

>      * there is no runtime representation of the type-inferencing or checking
>        machinery

>      * there is no runtime representation of the evaluation machinery

>      * there is no runtime representation of the lexical or parsing machinery

So there is library support for all of this, in various forms:

    * lexer, parser, type checker, evaluator:
            ghc-api
            hs-plugins

    * lexer, parser, pretty printer
            many parser libs (Language.Haskell, Template Haskell)

    * runtime type representation
            Data.Typeable

    * reflecting code to data:
            Data.Generics

-- Don