On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 08:50:42PM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
On 24/02/10 18:23, Ian Lynagh wrote: While I agree with these points, I was converted to record punning (actually record wildcards) when I rewrote the GHC IO library. Handle is a record with 12 or so fields, and there are literally dozens of functions that start like this:
flushWriteBuffer :: Handle -> IO () flushWriteBuffer Handle{..} = do
if I had to write out the field names I use each time, and even worse, think up names to bind to each of them, it would be hideous.
There are reasons to find this distasteful, yes, but I think the alternative is much worse.
I'm not proposing record wildcards (yet) *cough* labelled-field wildcards, but punning is a step in the right direction.
Yes. I too have had this issue with jhc and am a big fan of GHC's field wildcards. It is motivation enough for me to require a newer version of ghc for compiling jhc. I'd support field wildcards in 2011, but would understand if people thought it was too soon. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/