Although it's a bit off topic, I must say I agree with Malcolm on that. Record-fields-selection-as-functions might be sometime unconvenient, but it is simple and easy to reason about and deal with, with usual Haskell strategies (prefixed names, modules, qualified imports ... business as usual). However, records updating is often painful. A lot of thoughts have been put in lenses, and they quiet improve the state of things. But, franckly, having to pragma template haskell, then prefix all the fields with an underscore, then call a TH splice straight in my code in not a pleasure. Nor is a pleasure to hand-craft lenses. An improvement on this front is probably easier to achieve, would make syntax more consistent, and be immediatly applicable at large scale. Malcolm> I very much fail to see the point of replacing prefix function Malcolm> application with postfix dots, merely for field selection. Malcolm> There are already some imperfect, but adequate, solutions to Malcolm> the problem of global uniqueness of field names. But you now Malcolm> have mentioned what is really bothering me about this Malcolm> discussion: record updates are simply the most painful and Malcolm> least beautiful part of the Haskell syntax. Their verbosity is Malcolm> astonishing compared to the careful tenseness of every other Malcolm> language construct. If we could spend some effort on designing Malcolm> a decent notation for field updates, I think it would be Malcolm> altogether more likely to garner support than fiddling with Malcolm> dots. -- Paul