texpr | Boolean evaluation and digital calculation expression engine | Apps library

This answer will have to be a bit high-level, because there are three entirely different families of possible designs to fix that problem. What you’re doing seems closer to approach three, but the approaches are ordered by increasing complexity.

Translating the original post requires Template Haskell and partiality; find would return a Q.Exp representing some Hom a b, avoiding this problem just like the original post. Just like in the original post, a type error in the original code would be caught when typechecking the output of all the Template Haskell functions. So, type errors are still caught before runtime, but you will still need to write tests to find cases where your macros output ill-typed expressions. One can give stronger guarantees, at the cost of a significant increase in complexity.

If you want to diverge from the post, one alternative is to use “dependent typing” throughout and make the input dependently-typed. I use the term loosely to include both actually dependently-typed languages, actual Dependent Haskell (when it lands), and ways to fake dependent typing in Haskell today (via GADTs, singletons, and what not). However, you lose the ability to write your own typechecker and choose which type system to use; typically, you end up embedding a simply-typed lambda calculus, and can simulate polymorphism via polymorphic Haskell functions that can generate terms at a given type. This is easier in dependently-typed languages, but possible at all in Haskell.

But honestly, in this road it’s easier to use higher-order abstract syntax and Haskell functions, with something like: