[Haskell-cafe] Data-Type Serialization

[Stephen Tetley]

I think both ATerms and the Zephyr project's ASDL could handle
recursive types - certainly ASDL was a sum and product representation
like ML or Haskell's algebraic types (ATerms were a bit more like
Prolog). Both never gained much traction and for better or worse JSON
won the game.

I implemented generators for both a very long time ago when I was
staring out with Haskell. I didn't use TH or a generics library. If I
were doing it again now I'd start with a generics library and see how
that pans out - basically you want a type representation and generics
libraries have that already. Also I'm no fan of TH.