On 4/02/2012, at 12:13 AM, Gábor Lehel wrote:
All of this said, record.field is still the most readable, intuitive, and familiar syntax for selecting a field from a record that I know of.
Having learned COBOL and Algol 68 before Haskell was dreamed of, I regard field OF record as the most readable, intuitive, and familiar syntax. Given our background in reading natural language text, most of us probably thought once upon a time that '.' was the most readable, intuitive, and familiar syntax for terminating a statement, and in COBOL, NDL, and Smalltalk, it _is_. There's certainly nothing about a dot that suggests field selection, *unless* you happen to be familiar with a programming language that does it that way. If we are going to let compatibility with Pascal or C or the like be our guide to readability and intuition, when are we going to switch from "!" and "!!" for indexing to _[_]?