There is an effort underway to make Haskell's Records better. The discussion is ongoing on the ghc-users mail list, ... in the direction of making the most minimal changes possible to achieve some simple record name-spacing.
Thanks, Greg Weber
Thank you Greg, Yes I know, and I have been trying to follow along (intermittently). Thank you for your attempts to marshall the discussion. What would really, really help me is for someone to have a look at the 'solution' I posted to the difficulties SPJ saw with the SORF approach. (I ref'd it in my reply to Steve.) It seemed from my testing to address the needs. Since I got it working in GHC 7.2.1, there's a good chance it will need only "minimal changes" to implement (I'm thinking mostly syntactic sugar) -- providing of course that it is workable and generalisable enough. It could possibly benefit from some of the new Kind-level stuff in 7.4.1 (that SPJ used, but wasn't available to me at the time). I keep trying to make the time to write up the full proposal on the Wiki. I see it as a 'tweak' to SORF. Given that I'm supposed to have a day job, I'm reluctant to make time until/unless someone else double-checks whether I'm barking up the wrong tree. Anthony