On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Lauri Alanko
On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 07:04:16PM +1030, John Lask wrote:
it is often desirable to have the same field names for many records in the same module.
very much so, this is currently possible, with the restriction that the field names must have the same type modulo the record it is selecting on.
what is disirable is that this restriction be lifted.
Why on earth? I thought that the motivation for this feature was simply to deal with naming conflicts with _unrelated_ records from _unrelated_ modules without having to resort to qualified names. But I can't see why someone would use the same accessor name for unrelated records in a single module. And if the records are related (and the field is conceptually "the same" for the records), then you can use a type class to overload the accessor name in a controlled fashion.
So why would you ever need to reuse the same field name in the same module?
data PetOwner data FurnitureOwner data Cat = Cat { owner :: PetOwner } data Chair = Chair { owner :: FurnitureOwner } Just the first thing that came to mind, this kind of thing comes up often enough to be an irritant. I'm not sure whether or not TDNR is a good solution to the problem, just pointing out a use case. Micahel