At 2002-02-19 20:50, Eray Ozkural wrote:

...

It's ugly, and isn't part of the spirit of the language.

The above statement cannot be a basis for any argument against Bernard's proposal.

It's an aesthetic argument that hopes for an aesthetic consensus among Haskell users (which may or may not exist). ...

Since you are defining the spirit of the language,

Oh no, spirit cannot be defined, only suggested. ...

A general concept such as reflection cannot be deemed as worthless in itself.

It might reasonably be considered inappropriate to Haskell. Reflection may be useful for debugging, so I would not call it worthless. I consider reflection such as Generics to be in more or less the same aesthetic category as unsafe IO functions -- something to be generally avoided but perhaps useful in certain limited contexts such as debugging. I don't use Generics or unsafe-anything in my Haskell software. I _do_ occasionally use the 'deriving' construct, which is strictly speaking reflection though I think a relatively harmless form. What I would hate to see is widespread use of reflection in general programs. It rather seems to miss the point of Haskell's type system.

Any system that has a tiny bit of introspective powers can be said to be reflective to some extent, for instance a Haskell interpreter.

That's fine, but I don't include a Haskell interpreter in my compiled Haskell programs. And I don't want other people peeking inside my types at run-time. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA