On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Isaac Dupree <ml@isaac.cedarswampstudios.org> wrote:

You mean this wiki page, right?:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records/NameSpacing

That is, there are no fundamental
objections to the implementation of this records implementation.

I think that might be overly optimistic... I think there's a risk that SPJ finds an irritating complication to type inference & the rest of us aren't type-system-savvy enough to continue trying to guess at that :) But I think you're referring to whether we object to ad-hoc overloading of record field names (neither parametric nor class-based polymorphism), if no difficulties crop up. Some of the concerns on http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/TypeDirectedNameResolution apply -- I'm not sure to what extent, but address those concerns rather than require those people to repeat themselves again! :)

(If we dodge all those obstacles, well, a better record system is better!)

This shouldn't complicate type inference (other than the fact that we must avoid a left-right bias?) because the record field names are not overloaded - instead it puts some burden back on the user to add more type annotations. The difficult aspect of TDNR was that it was assuming overloading - although there is really no reason why it can't instead assume name-spacing. TDNR and this record proposal share many of the same syntax issues you list. Thanks for the detailed feedback! I am travelling right now, will review when I get a chance.

Greg Weber