Hi, I'd like to propose an extremely simple extension to ghc's record disambiguation rules, my motivation is that I often have record types with multiple constructors but common fields. so the handy idiom of f Rec { .. } = do blah return Rec { .. } won't work, because I don't know the specific constructor. so, my proposal is that when you come across something like (e::RecType) { blah = foo } (with an explicit type signature like shown) You interpret 'blah' as if it is a field of the record of type 'Rec'. This gives the advantages of record field names being scoped by type but without you having to specify the precise constructor. It is also backwards compatible for expressions, but would be a new thing for patterns which generally don't allow type signatures there. It sidesteps type checker interactions by only being triggered when an explicit type annotation is included. ideally it would be combined with the 'update' and 'label-based pattern-matching' extensions from this page http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/ExistingRecords John