
Hi, I am hoping to do a GSoC project this year working on GHC, and have been pointed in the direction of the records issue (in particular, the desire to overload field names). This has been discussed on-and-off for years, and while there are lots of ideas [1], little has been implemented in GHC itself. The plan would be to implement a solution to the "narrow issue" of overloaded field names, along the lines of Simon PJ's SORF proposal (on the wiki). This would provide a basis for experimentation with first-class record types. While there are still design issues to resolve, the broad plan is clear and I'm confident it can be implemented in a summer and without overly restricting future record system designs. Does this sound like a reasonable strategy? I'd appreciate comments and criticism, although arguing about the details of the design should perhaps wait. (A little about me: I'm a PhD student working on type inference for Haskell and dependent types, with about four years' Haskell experience including work on big type-system related projects. I am familiar with the theory behind GHC, but I haven't worked on the code before.) Thanks, Adam Gundry [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records