Am Montag, den 07.11.2011, 23:30 +0000 schrieb Simon Peyton-Jones:
Wolfgang
Is there a wiki page giving a specific, concrete design for the proposal you advocate? Something at the level of detail of http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records/OverloadedRecordFields?
Well, I don’t propose a new record system as a language feature. Instead, I’ve implemented a record system as a library. The paper at http://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~jeltsch/research/ppdp-2010-paper.pdf describes this in detail, and the records package at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/records is the actual library. My stance is that it is possibly better if we do not try to include a one-size-fits-it-all record system into the language, but if the language provided support for basic things that almost all record system *libraries* would need. In my opinion, there is at least one such thing that should get language support: field labels. There is already the proposal at http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/FirstClassLabels for first-class field labels.
I am unsure whether you regard it as an alternative to the above, or something that should be done as well. And if the former, how does it relate to the challenge articulated on http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records, namely how to make Haskell's existing named-field system work better?
I don’t think that everyone should use my record system. I see it as one member of a family of reasonable record systems. My intention, when developing my record system, was not to make the existing system better, since I needed quite a lot of advanced features that anything near Haskell’s existing record system couldn’t give me. So I started something completely new.
Thanks
Simon
Best wishes, Wolfgang