[Haskell-cafe] Template Haskell very wordy w/r/t Decs and Types

[Ross Mellgren]

Hi all,

I'm writing a small module that exposes a template haskell splice that  
takes a (very simplified) C struct definition and builds:

  - A data type definition,
  - an instance for Data.Binary.Binary,
  - and optionally a pretty print function for it

However, it seems to do this I have to write a bunch of really ugly  
code that builds up the TH data structures "by hand" because quoting  
only works with splices for expressions, or so it seems.

For example, to generate the binary instance I have this code:

import qualified Language.Haskell.TH as TH

-- tyname is the name of the data type I've already created, as a  
TH.Name
-- tempnames is a list of temporary variable names that are used in  
lambda patterns
-- fields is a list of tuples describing each field
-- makeGetExp recursively builds a monadic computation consisting  
mostly of Binary.getWord32be >>= \ tempvar -> ...

     binaryInstDec <- liftM (TH.InstanceD [] (TH.AppT (TH.ConT $  
TH.mkName "Data.Binary.Binary") (TH.ConT tyname)))
                            [d| get = $(makeGetExp (reverse $ zip  
fields tempnames) returnExp)
                                put = undefined |]

I'd really rather write:

     binaryInstDec <- [d|
         instance Binary.Binary $(tyname) where
             get = $(makeGetExp (reverse $ zip fields tempnames)  
returnExp)
             put = undefined |]

But GHC gives me a syntax error on the tyname splice. The docs seem to  
indicate this is the way it is -- that splices in type locations is  
plain not implemented.

My question is whether or not this is just the way it is, and people  
writing TH declaration splices tend to have to start manually  
assembling a bunch of it, or is there some trick I've missed? Perhaps  
even better are there some tricks that people tend to use to make this  
less painful?

I did try using some of the lowercased monadic constructors in  
Language.Haskell.TH.Lib but I didn't seem to get anything more succint  
out of it.

-Ross

P.S. This is for a one-off weekend project, and the code is fugly, so  
I'm not posting it in its entirety here. If you want the whole module  
and are willing not to laugh, I'd be glad to send it along ;-)

Background:

I'm doing this because I'm writing a tool to snoop around the  
filesystem structures of HFS+ to try and help a friend recover some  
data off a sufficiently dead drive that fsck doesn't want to touch it,  
and I don't want to pay money just to find out the drive is too toasty  
to pull out the data.

In any case, the HFS+ docs have a bunch of C struct definitions that  
comprise the structures, and I got tired of hand-writing data  
definitions and binary instances, so I figured I'd make TH do it for me.