quoth Evan Laforge
Doesn't hsc2hs give you the size with #size? I feel like I'm not understanding your approach.
Maybe it does, and I only need a clue to the syntax. I have seen it used only for the size of the struct; I'm looking for the size of a field - and devoid of parentheses or other adornments, so I can tack it onto something like Word or Int. You could define type aliases for other variable-size foreign types, like Float8 etc. and use #fieldsize to select them. One of your objections was that you're obliged to code field types in the .hsc file, and if you make an error or the types are changed later in the C code, hsc2hs doesn't notice. This approach gives you a way to partially derive a foreign type from the size of the field. I don't know language-c. Lots of interesting potential there if it works well. Donn