How would that be different from the ORF? The library as it stands is worse than the ORF: translation into (essentially) tuples hurts error messages; no good story for sum types; no way to make fields strict/unpacked etc. Hopefully, if this is to become a ghc extension, these problems will be addressed; but then I don't see much difference with the ORF (and thus it wouldn't be any easier to implement). On 20/01/15 23:44, Simon Marlow wrote:
For those who haven't seen this, Nikita Volkov proposed a new approach to anonymous records, which can be found in the "record" package on Hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/record
It had a *lot* of attention on Reddit: http://nikita-volkov.github.io/record/
Now, the solution is very nice and lightweight, but because it is implemented outside GHC it relies on quasi-quotation (amazing that it can be done at all!). It has some limitations because it needs to parse Haskell syntax, and Haskell is big. So we could make this a lot smoother, both for the implementation and the user, by directly supporting anonymous record syntax in GHC. Obviously we'd have to move the library code into base too.
This message is by way of kicking off the discussion, since nobody else seems to have done so yet. Can we agree that this is the right thing and should be directly supported by GHC? At this point we'd be aiming for 7.12.
Who is interested in working on this? Nikita?
There are various design decisions to think about. For example, when the quasi-quote brackets are removed, the syntax will conflict with the existing record syntax. The syntax ends up being similar to Simon's 2003 proposal http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Haskell/records.html (there are major differences though, notably the use of lenses for selection and update).
I created a template wiki page: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records/Volkov
Cheers, Simon _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs