[Haskell-cafe] Read instance for constructors?

[Niklas Haas]

> Thank you very much — it works! [and many new useful functions discovered along the way :-)].
> 
> I'm fairly happy with this solution (using readConstr as suggested by Niklas,
> and fromConstrB, as per above). The only wrinkle now is with this term in the definition of f :
> 
> dataTypeOf $ B 1
> 
> We provide a value here (B 1) — is there a way to make it take the constructor (B)
> instead, or, alternatively, make f aware of the signature of the constructor (Int -> D) and/or the resulting
> data type (D) somehow? I've hoogled it and also looked through Data.Data with no luck…
> 
> It's just that constructing a full-blown value of type D might be non-trivial if D is complex,
> but it seems a bit wasteful as we are after the outer constructor alone.
> And of course, if D or types D depends on change we need to modify f…
> 
> Thank you,
> S.

The idiomatic way to handle this kind of stuff normally is to pass an
abstract proxy that carries the type as a type argument, rather than
passing a value of that type itself, eg.:

> data Proxy a = Proxy
>
> dataTypeOf :: Data a => Proxy a -> DataTypeOf

or even a more polymorphic version:

> dataTypeOf :: Data a => f a -> DataTypeOf

which can be instantiated at any ‘f’, including Proxy, [], Maybe or
others.

Unfortunately, it does not seem that Data.Data.Data has gone for this
route, so my feedback is a bit useless. You could still provide your own
wrapper function (that uses ‘undefined’ internally, which we know here
to be safe even though it's ugly), though.