[Haskell-cafe] DSLs with {in,}equalities

[Adam Vogt]

This seems to be in ghc for those reasons:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Quasiquotation

* On Monday, March 02 2009, Andrew Hunter wrote:

>Several times now I've had to define an EDSL for working with
>(vaguely) numeric expressions.  For stuff like 2*X+Y, this is easy,
>looking pretty much like:
>
>> data Expr = Const Integer | Plus Expr Expr | Times Expr Expr
>>
>> instance Num Expr where
>> fromInterger = Const
>> (+) = Plus
>> (*) = Times
>
>&c.  This lets me get a perfectly nice AST, which is what I want.
>When I want to be able to express and work with inequalities and
>equalities, this breaks.  Suppose I want to write 2*X + Y < 3.  I
>either have to:
>
>a) Hide Prelude.(<) and define a simple < that builds the AST term I want.
>b) Come up with a new symbol for it that doesn't look totally awful.
>
>Neither of these work decently well.  Hiding Eq and Ord operators,
>which is what I effectively have to do for a), is pretty much a
>nonstarter--we'll have to use them too much for that to be practical.
>
>On the other hand, b) works...but is about as ugly as it gets.  We
>have lots and lots of symbols that are already taken for important
>purposes that are syntactically "near" <,<=,==, and the like: << and
>>> and >>= for monads, >>> for arrows, etc.  There...are not good
>choices that I know of for the symbols that don't defeat the purpose
>of making a nice clean EDSL for expressions; I might as well use 3*X +
>Y `lessthan` 3, which is just not cool.
>
>Does anyone know of a good solution, here?  Are there good
>substitutions for all the six operators that are important
>(<,>,>=,<=,==,/=), that are close enough to be pretty-looking but not
>used for other important modules?
>
>Better yet, though a little harder, is there a nice type trick I'm not
>thinking of?  This works for Num methods but not for Ord methods
>because:
>
>(+) :: (Num a) => a -> a -> a
>(<) :: (Ord a) => a -> a -> Bool
>
>i.e. the return type of comparisons is totally fixed.  I don't suppose
>there's a good way to...well, I don't know what the *right* answer is,
>but maybe define a new typeclass with a more flexible type for < that
>lets both standard types return Bool and my expressions return Expr?
>Any good solution would be appreciated.  
>
>Thanks,
>AHH
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