Re: [Haskell-cafe] type inference and named fields

Malcolm Wallace wrote:

Yes, I find it interesting that consecutive updates are not equivalent to a combined update. I believe this is largely because named fields are defined as sugar - they behave in some sense like textual macros in other languages, which can often turn out to have unexpected properties.

I share your characterization "like textual macros". The question is, should this be eliminated? Would it be cleaner, though less convenient some times, if the types of updated values must not change? (Of course, it is no realistic option to change that in Haskell, since probably too much existing code would break.) Christian