I am trying to port a programme written in Maude, which is a reflective language based on rewriting logic ( http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu/ ), to Haskell. I thought using Template Haskell might be a good idea, but I got stuck and now I am wondering if this is really possible in Haskell. Let me give an example of a Maude module defining the function last over a list of Peano numbers. fmod LAST is sorts Peano PeanoList . op 0 : -> Peano [ctor] . op s : Peano -> Peano [ctor] . op [] : -> PeanoList [ctor] . op cons : Peano PeanoList -> PeanoList [ctor] . op last : PeanoList -> Peano . vars X Y : Peano . var Xs : PeanoList . eq last(cons(X,[])) = X . eq last(cons(X,cons(Y,Xs))) = last(cons(Y,Xs)) . endfm So, last(cons(s(0),cons(s(s(0)),cons(s(s(s(0))),[])))) would reduce to s(s(s(0))). The cool thing about Maude is, that terms, modules, ... can be lifted to the meta level. For example: upModule('LAST, false) would yield