deriving (was Re: storing to a file)

[Mark Carroll]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, matt hellige wrote:
(snip)
> well, here's one way it might work:
> http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/derive.htm

I'll take a look at that - thanks - it might answer a few of my "generic
programming" questions.

> although i'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'add your own
> "deriving" things'... :)

I was thinking that it might be nice to be able to write Haskell to add,
say, a "deriving XML" or "deriving ASN1" feature whose instances provide
methods to convert between Haskell data structures and those formats,
instead of having to hack the compiler to achieve such automated method
writing.

BTW, those typed returns on sockets that Shawn mentioned sounded
interesting. IIRC Modula-3 also had some approach to worrying about data
exchange between older and newer versions of the same program.

-- Mark