Re: [ghc-steering-committee] Records again

On Dec 17, 2019, at 10:32 AM, Joachim Breitner wrote:

I would find it bad, though, if we have

f r.x.y = f (r.x.y)

but disallow or give completely different meaning (as in the bare .y variants) to

f r.x .y

Just to repeat one of Simon's arguments he used against me yesterday: How do you feel about `f x_y` vs `f x _y`? We have no trouble accepting that whitespace is significant there. If we accept that `.` is part of the construction of a token, then this is all very natural. Somehow, we read `_` this way. If we view `.` as something else, then it's much harder. I'm in the "view as something else" camp, but the argument above made me realize that I didn't have to revise the whole way I parse Haskell in order to understand the new syntax -- I just have to reclassify the lexical category of `.`. In the end, I don't feel strongly about this all. And (for me) the authors' comments that `f r.x = (f r).x` is abhorrent carries weight. Richard