Quoth AntC
No, Donn, it's not the lack of syntax, it's the lack of semantics for first- class (polymorphic) record update. And there's very little that's obvious.
Ah, you're right, I certainly shouldn't have used the word "syntax" there. But just to be clear on the point, I wonder if you could expand on what you mean by "polymorphic" above. I mean, when I wrote modifyRecord :: RecordType r => (a -> a) -> (r -> a) -> r -> r ... while this does obviously represent a polymorphic function, if I write data Config { tempo :: Int, ...} f = modifyRecord tempo (+20) ... then f has type Config -> Config, it isn't polymorphic. I am however vaguely aware that some parties to the Record Question would like to make record fields themselves polymorphic, so that 'tempo' could be defined for multiple record types and 'f' would, I suppose, have a type like RecordThatHasTempo r => r -> r Maybe that's semantically more like "overloading", but in any case, it isn't strictly necessary in order to support first class updates, true? Donn