Hi Mulhern,

I would like to teach a small section on polytypism/genericity in the "functional programming using Haskell" course I'm teaching. I won't, though, unless I can assign an actual programming exercise in polytypic programming, however brief. Can anybody recommend a functioning compiler that I can reasonably require the students to use in doing this assignment? I am not up-to-date on the current state of research in this topic in Haskell and hope that some people on the list can help me out.

There is of course Generic Haskell [1], which works. It is not being maintained anymore, but it still does what it was designed to do. There are plenty of publications to use for resources.

Currently, most of the work on datatype-generic programming generally ends up in libraries and not in language extensions. You can see quite a few on Hackage [2]. Many of them have links to publications for further study.

At Utrecht University, we have a master's course on Generic Programming [3]. That may be more than you want, but you can refer to our slides for further information. We also use lecture notes [4] for this course. They provide a pretty good introduction to a few libraries, LIGD, EMGM, and SYB.

Hope this helps! Let us know if you would like something else.

Regards,
Sean

[1] http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/projects/generic-haskell/
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html#cat:generics
[3] http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GP
[4] http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/UU-CS-2008-025.html