On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 1:30 AM, Bulat Ziganshin
of course this may be done with code generation tools (such as TH). point of this research is to do this using type abilities of Haskell
Yes, I know. My point was that TH could be used as a minimal "String -> ExpQ" wrapper, where the ExpQ is the code used by this library, to save keystrokes. I'm all about writing 100 lines of code to save 10 keystrokes per use of a function. :)
Don, i think this should be impossible with IsString since the point is that Haskell compiler should know types at compile time. IsString can't convert "%d" into (X int) while converting "%s" into (X String)
Although of course you could use IsString to convert raw strings into 'lit "string"'; this would make the syntax slightly more palatable:
printf ("hello" ^ char ^ "world" ^ char) ' ' '!'
-- ryan