Although another responder floated Template Haskell as Haskell's alternative to macros, Haskell loses out in that comparison. TH is both harder to work with tha

Although another responder floated Template Haskell as Haskell's alternative to macros, Haskell loses out in that comparison. TH is both harder to work with than Lisp macros and sacrifices type safety[1], so it is avoided where possible. TH is used to generate boilerplate, but for other purposes (especially creating DSLs), Haskell favors abuse of do-notation through something like Free Monads[2]. Of course, this is nothing at all like macros, but in practice we can achieve many of the same goals while maintaining type safety. So, win win win (the third win is for monads). [1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/10857227/1579612 http://stackoverflow.com/a/10857227/1579612 [2] http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented-free-monads.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented... EDIT: As dons points out, I was imprecise in my wording. I don't mean to say that TH leads to Haskell programs which are not type safe. The compiler will, of course, type check generated code. In general, given that dons has been programming Haskell for 14 years compared to myself who has been doing it for 1 year, prefer what he has to say on this subject.