While I do value consistency, let me pet-peeve for a minute here (sorry in advance Edward for the rant). The word “reify” comes from the latin “res”, which means object/thing. It should always mean something along the line of “making more concrete”. In normalisation by evaluation, for instance, you reify a semantic value as syntax (an object of the language of study), and you reflect values of the language into the semantic domain.

To me, the reflection library uses the terms inconsistently. For instance you have the type ReifiedMonoid for the concrete type representing a monoid instance. This is, in my opinion, the right terminology. However, a ReifiedMonoid should be the product of reification, but in the reflection library it actually gets reify-d further. This doesn’t seem to work at the grammar level. I contend that the function should have been reflect all along: you reflect a concrete dictionary object into the nebulous, untouchable world of type class instances.

It’s probably too late to fix the reflection library, hence me never complaining about it (in public :-) ). But I vote we don’t perpetuate this situation, and still call the function reflectDict.

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