Comment by alphonse23

I mentioned it in the comments of Edward Yang's article but I'll mention it here again, Template Haskell is based on C++ templates, here's the original paper http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers.... Haskell was written to mimic C++ more than lisp, at least when it comes to meta programming. And if you read the paper having the compiler check the template code before the expansion is there by design decision, that's why it's compile time only.