Sean,
The answer is, I'm working on a recently semi-released package called TrieMap.
The objective of this package, building off of the work in this paper, is to automatically derive the type of a generalized trie for any algebraic type based on its algebraic representation. (I am working on writing up my methods for publication.)
Of course, if I could get automatic access to the mechanisms of a type's constructors, I wouldn't even require users to describe the algebraic representation of their type...
Louis Wasserman
wasserman.louis@gmail.com
I don't know a thing about SYB, Data.Data, or Data.Typeable, mostly because I'm an efficiency fanatic. Nevertheless, I'd like to know whether or not there's a way to deconstruct a (mostly) arbitrary type, into tuples, unions, etc. using this framework. Any thoughts?
You can use the Template Haskell deriving in EMGM to get that structure pretty efficiently.
http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GenericProgramming/EMGM
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/emgm
The obligatory question is: why do you want it?
Sean