deriving (was Re: storing to a file)

G'day all. On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 09:56:24AM -0500, Mark Carroll wrote:

Actually, "deriving binary" would be a nice thing to have in general - even more, a way to add your own "deriving" things from within Haskell, although I have no idea how such a thing would work.

Actually, there's one situation where it would work easily, and that is when used with newtype. Apart from "Show" and "Read", which are special cases anyway, the "deriving" operation on newtype has a simple meaning: inherit instances from the type being wrapped. Thoughts? Cheers, Andrew Bromage