[Haskell-cafe] ANN: true-name 0.1.0.0 released

[Liyang HU]

> Also sent to comp.lang.haskell, & to convince Gmane I'm not top-posting.

It is with some shame that I announce ‘true-name’, a package to assist
one in violating those pesky module abstraction boundaries via the
magick of Template Haskell.

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/true-name


Take ‘Control.Concurrent.Chan’ for example; you can get your grubby
mitts on the ‘Chan’ data constructor, despite it not being exported.
Here we pattern match on it, and bind ‘chanR’ and ‘chanW’ to the
‘MVar’s containing the read and write ends of the channel respectively:

>   chan@[truename| ''Chan Chan | chanR chanW |] <- newChan
>   writeChan chan (42 :: Int)

Now, the type of ’chanR’ references the unexported ‘Stream’ and
‘ChItem’ types. We need the ‘ChItem’ data constructor―which is
hidden under a few indirections—but that's not a problem:

>   streamR <- readMVar chanR
>   [truename| ''Chan Chan Stream ChItem ChItem | x _ |] <- readMVar streamR
>   putStrLn $ "chan contains: " ++ show x

This gives us a rather dodgy ‘peekChan’. This sort of thing is usually
a Bad Idea™, but may sometimes be more palatable than the alternatives.
Full example: https://github.com/liyang/true-name/blob/master/sanity.hs


Taking another example, suppose we want the ‘Array’ type constructor
hidden deep in the bowels of the ‘HashMap’ implementation:

ghci> :set -XQuasiQuotes
ghci> import Data.HashMap.Strict
ghci> :kind [truename| ''HashMap Full Array |]
[truename| ''HashMap Full Array |] :: * -> *

The ‘Array’ data constructor is one more reification away:

ghci> :type [truename| ''HashMap Full Array Array |]
[truename| ''HashMap Full Array Array |]
  :: ghc-prim-0.4.0.0:GHC.Prim.Array# a
     -> unordered-containers-0.2.5.1:Data.HashMap.Array.Array a
     
Please don't flame me.
/Liyang