On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 08:47:30AM +0000, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Provoked the (very constructive) Yesod blog post on "Limitations of Haskell", and the follow up discussion, I've started a wiki page to collect whatever ideas we have about the name spacing issue for record fields.
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records
As Simon M said on Reddit, this is something we'd like to fix; but we need a consensus on how to fix it.
Re TypeDirectedNameResolution, I would actually prefer it if it were less general. i.e. if you were to write x.f then f would be required to be a record selector. Then there's no need for the "If there is exactly one f whose type matches that of x" unpleasantness. Instead, the type of x must be inferred first (without any knowledge about the type of f), and then we know immediately which f is being referred to. Thanks Ian