Quasi quoting

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| quotations of the form [| .... |] (i.e. no 'language' specified) will
| use an implicit parameter* ('quasi', say) of type QuasiQuoter, if in
| scope.  Otherwise, they will behave as they currently do (TH
| expression quotation?).  Now to awaken the 'pads' magic (or some other
| magic), you'd do this somewhere:
| 
| quasi = pads

Nice idea, but won't work as specified.  The thing is that the quasiquoter is run at *compile time*.  So it can't be an implicit parameter, which is by definition only available at runtime

	f :: (?q:QuasiQuoter) => ..blah...

A variant of your suggestion would be: for any quote [|..blah..|] behave as if the programmer had written [quasiQuoter| ...blah...|].  That is, simply pick up whatever record named "quasiQuoter" is in scope. Then you'd say
	import Pads( quasiQuoter )
and away you go.  But you can only use one at a time.  

That might be quite convenient, but alas [|...|] has already been taken by Template Haskell quotes, meaning [e| ...|].  So you'd need something else.  [*|...|]  perhaps.  

Or we could switch to different quotation brackets altogether for quasiquotation, the obvious possibility being <|...blah...|>, and <pads|...blah...|>.  That would not be hard, and would only affect the handful of current quasiquote users.  But it'd remove "<|" and "|>" as a valid operators, at least for quasiquote customers.  I don't know how bad that would be.

Simon