In my application, I want some of the fields in a record to have default values while others must always be specified by the user. I can implement this using the rawr records library (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/rawr) like so: def :: ("b" := String) -> R ("a" := Int, "b" := String) def t = (R (#a := 0) :*: R t) -- merge with defaults let r = def (#b := "hello") Here field "a" has a default value (i.e. it is optional when "def" is used) but field "b" does not have a default value and has to be explicitly specified by the user. This is made possible by record merging feature of rawr, making the record extensible. I could not find an equivalent way of achieving this using overloaded records (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/overloaded-records). Is record merging possible or can be made possible using overloaded-records or with the ghc overloaded records poposal? If not, is there a plan to make something like this possible in future? Or will this never be possible with the in built record syntax? Note that, this is handy to simulate mandatory and optional keyword arguments to a function by passing them in the form of a record. Something which is available in other languages like python. -harendra