On Mon, 27 Dec 2010, Jonas Almström Duregård wrote:
Hi Henning,
I also think that Template Haskell is used too much. Several things that are done in existing libraries could be done in plain Haskell in a better way.
Can you give any examples of this? I'm not saying it's not true, I'm just curious as to why you would venture into the realm of TH without a reason.
E.g. refer to the recent discussion of storable-endian. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-December/087551.html Or look into package 'encoding'. It uses TemplateHaskell in order to convert Text descriptions of character sets into Haskell tables. I think the character tables could be simply rewritten to Haskell syntax, or they could be parsed by a function, where the parsed content is unfolded at compile time. It could even be computed at runtime, since it is only computed once because of laziness.