| There seems to be widespread agreement that the current situation wrt | records is unacceptable, but the official GHC policy is that there are too | many good ideas to choose from - so nothing gets done! I hence humbly | propose that [http://www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/download/papers/scopedlabels.pdf] | be adapted to GHC. In my naivete, I assume that porting an existing | implementation would be much easier than starting from scratch. ... | I think this would be a BIG mistake. Whatever system GHC settles on | is almost certain to become part of the Haskell standard, and this | particular system has some deep limitations which could not be got | round without ripping it all out and starting again. That this thread has attracted so much traffic in such a short time illustrates both its importance and why we have done nothing about it in GHC for ages! It's a swamp with many use-cases, many design choices, and many local optima. (It's less clear whether there is a global optimum, but I hope there is.) I'm happy to see a Wiki page to summarise and contrast different approaches; that seems like a constructive thing to do. (Email discussions tend to evaporate and then be repeated.) A useful thing to do would be to give a series of use-cases, or examples, showing the kinds of thing one would like to be able to do. Then you can classify the approaches by what examples they can handle. Simon