Simon, I think you are continuing to move forward admirably on this. Thank you for contributing my suggestion to the wiki. I just edited the wiki with some more commentary. In particular I added:

Frege has a detailed explanation of the semantics of its record implementation, and the language is *very* similar to Haskell. Lets just start by using Frege's document as the proposal. We can start a new wiki page as discussions are needed.

As previously stated on this thread, the Frege user manual is available here:
http://code.google.com/p/frege/downloads/detail?name=Language-202.pdf
see Sections 3.2 (primary expressions) and 4.2.1 (Algebraic Data type Declaration - Constructors with labeled fields)

To all those concerned about Records: look at the Frege implementation and poke holes in it. We only want critiques about
* achieving name-spacing right now
* implementing it in such a way that extensible records could be implemented in its place in the future, although we will not allow that discussion to hold up a records implementation now, just possibly modify things slightly.

Greg Weber

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 2:00 PM, Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:
| The lack of response, I believe, is just a lack of anyone who
| can cut through all the noise and come up with some
| practical way to move forward in one of the many possible
| directions.

You're right.  But it is very telling that the vast majority of responses on
       http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/nph9l/records_stalled_again_leadership_needed/
were not about the subject (leadership) but rather on suggesting yet more, incompletely-specified solutions to the original problem.  My modest attempt to build a consensus by articulating the simplest solution I could think of, manifestly failed.

The trouble is that I just don't have the bandwidth (or, if I'm honest, the motivation) to drive this through to a conclusion. And if no one else does either, perhaps it isn't *that* important to anyone.  That said, it clearly is *somewhat* important to a lot of people, so doing nothing isn't very satisfactory either.

Usually I feel I know how to move forward, but here I don't.

Simon