"edwardsbenj@gmail.com"
I was making the naive assumption that if OP didn't know about it then it wasn't prominent. That perhaps was a little hasty. There is a discussion of this very thing in the official user guide. First section, 7.16.1. Syntax.
I'm assuming you're referring to the subsection that begins: * The type environment seen by reify includes all the top-level declaration up to the end of the immediately preceding declaration group, but no more. So I'll just note that the text you refer to---which does, as you note, lay out those limitations---is new with 7.8, and I was using the docs for the compiler version I'm using, 7.6.3. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.6.3/html/users_guide/template-haskell.html Perhaps it would have made sense to consult the latest docs, but then it also refers to typed TH expression and other things that don't exist in 7.6.3. :) Mike.