Proposal: liftData for Template Haskell

[Edward Z. Yang]

Hello all,

It looks like people are opposed to doing with the lift type-class.
So here is a counterproposal: mark the Lift type class as overlappable,
and define an instance:

    instance Data a => Lift a where
        ...

This is fairly desirable, since GHC will sometimes generate a call to
'lift', in which case liftData can't be manually filled in.  People
can still define efficient versions of lift.

Edward

Excerpts from Edward Z. Yang's message of 2015-04-17 04:21:16 -0700:
> I propose adding the following function to Language.Haskell.TH:
> 
>     -- | 'liftData' is a variant of 'lift' in the 'Lift' type class which
>     -- works for any type with a 'Data' instance.
>     liftData :: Data a => a -> Q Exp
>     liftData = dataToExpQ (const Nothing)
> 
> I don't really know which submodule this should come from;
> since it uses 'dataToExpQ', you might put it in Language.Haskell.TH.Quote
> but arguably 'dataToExpQ' doesn't belong in this module either,
> and it only lives there because it is a useful function for defining
> quasiquoters and it was described in the quasiquoting paper.
> 
> I might propose getting rid of the 'Lift' class entirely, but you
> might prefer that class since it doesn't go through SYB (and have
> the attendant slowdown).
> 
> This mode of use of 'dataToExpQ' deserves more attention.
> 
> Discussion period: 1 month
> 
> Cheers,
> Edward