[continuation, hit sent too soon, sorry] Oh, and here is a nice way to justify the JS variant in a very functionally motivated way. Not sure if it is helpful, though, but it certainly is a cute angle… A record r with fields foo and bar can be thought of as a _function_ with domain {.foo, .bar} (and a dependent return type, but we are talking syntax, not types). With that point of view, the syntax r .foo _is_ simply function application. And we do not need _any_ custom mental parsing rules at all, and get f r.field y = ((f r).field) y f r .field y = ((f r).field) y and now of course you write f (r.x) or f (r .x) just like you would write f (g x) Cheers, Joachim -- Joachim Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de http://www.joachim-breitner.de/