Well, marshalling functions (or storing-restoring some internal forms of them) might be especially nice... This would mean I can declare and compile a function on my side of a network connection (for example), and then send it to the other end for evaluation, and then get the result. Like a database request.
I've got a different and (IMHO) more interesting application: upgrading code on the other side of a network. Application startup would be downloading updates from the server, then loading all the code from disk.
Is this something absolutely impossible in Haskell and by what reason? Just because of strong typing (forgive my stupidity ;)? Or are there some deeper theoretical limitations?
No theoretical limitations but practical ones. AFAIK, dynamic code loading has issues with garbage collection and global optimization - it's certainly doable and some languages do it, but it's nontrivial and certainly a lot of work.
I'd like to have it anyway :-)
But I'm not going to hold my breath for it; it's probably more prudent to try things with the currently available mechanisms (that is, Show/Read and Binary).
Regards, Jo
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