What is Haskell's Data.Typeable?

Question

I\'ve come across references to Haskell\'s Data.Typeable, but it\'s not clear to me why I would want to use it in my code.

What problem does it solve, and h

Answer 1

It's a library that allows, among other things, naming types. If a type a is declared Typeable, then you can get its name using show $ typeOf x where x is any value of type a. It also features limited type-casting.

(This is somewhat similar to C++'s RTTI or dynamic languages' reflection.)