On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 10:46 PM, Ganesh Sittampalam
One benefit of TDNR is to replicate the discoverability of APIs that OO programming has - if x :: Foo then typing "x." in an IDE gives you a list of things you can do with a Foo. (Obviously it's not a complete lis for various reasons, but it does allow the author of Foo and others to design discoverable APIs.)
So I think we'd be losing quite a bit to force f to be a record selector.
I'm not sure how to make update work if you allow arbitrary functions on the RHS of a dot. If you expose the Select and Update class, you get some additional flexibility (i.e., the programmer can define new selectors besides field names), but still have a chance to define update (when it's reasonable). /g -- "I’m surprised you haven’t got a little purple space dog, just to ram home what an intergalactic wag you are."