(I've previously sent this mail to haskell-cafe, but I guess this list is more appropriate) Hi all, for my Master's thesis, I'm looking into functional hardware descriptions, and in particular to translate haskell code into VHDL that can be programmed into an FPGA. For this, I'm using the GHC API to load the haskell source and give me (simplified) core representation. I then walk over the core tree and translate it to VHDL. On the whole the GHC API has been very useful to me. It took me some time to get used to all the (deeply) nested (algebraic) types (I didn't have any previous haskell experience when I started a month or so ago), but things are working out by now. However, there are two issues bothering me still. The first is that the Core types (in particular CoreExpr) are not instances of Show. They are instances of Outputable, which allows them to be pretty printed. However, this pretty printing is good to view the structure of the expression that the CoreExpr represents, but doesn't show the structure of the CoreExpr itself. For example, tuple construction is printed simply as (a, b), while the actual core expression is a nested application of two types, and a and b to the GHC.Tuple.(,) function (or datacon?). Also, the exact constructors used are not quite clear, which made it harder to work with the Core language for me. Instead of looking at the structure of the CoreExpr and write the appropriate patterns, I had to resort to a lot of trial and error. I tried deriving show for CoreExpr myself, but that required me to derive Show for a dozen other types and resulted in type errors beyond my understanding. Is there any compelling reason that CoreExprs are not instances of Show? My second question concerns typle construction. Since tuple types are not primitive types, but dependent types defined in various places (GHC.Tuple and Base IIRC), code working with tuples is not fundamentally different from code working with other (user defined) dependent types and thus not trivial to recognize. I've found that there are some predicate functions that can tell me if a type is a tuple type, but I've had no such luck for the actual tuple construction. In particular, when an expression creates a tuple of two Ints (a, b), this is represented in Core as the application of the element types and the element values to the (,) function (or data constructor? Not sure about this, in Core it's just a Var and the isDataConName [IIRC] predicate crashes when run on the Var). For now, I've manually matched the Var's name to GHC.Tuple.(,) and removed all type arguments to get at the actual values in the tuple. This is of course completely non-portable, to tuples with more than two elements, or unboxed tuples, etc. Is there some predicate function that can do this for me in a more portable way? Gr. Matthijs