I'm very happy to see all the work you're putting into the record discussion, but I'm struggling to see why people are fighting so hard to get the dot character in particular for field access. It seems like a huge amount of work and discussion for a tiny bit of syntactic convenience that we've only come to expect because of exposure to other very different languages.

Is there some fundamental reason we couldn't settle for something like # (a valid operator, but we've already shown we're willing to throw that away in the MagicHash extension) or @ (only allowed in patterns for now)? Or we could even keep (#) as a valid operator and just have it mean category/lens composition.

Thanks,
Dan

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 9:11 PM, Greg Weber <greg@gregweber.info> wrote:
Similar to proposal #20, which wants to remove it, but immediately
less drastic, even though the long-term goal is the same.
This helps clear the way for the usage of the unspaced dot as a record
field selector as shown in proposal #129.

After this proposal shows clear signs of moving forward I will add a
proposal to support a unicode dot for function composition.
After that we can all have a lively discussion about how to fully
replace the ascii dot with an ascii alternative such as <~ or <<<
After that we can make the dot operator illegal by default.

This has already been discussed as part of a records solution on the
ghc-users mail list and documented here:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records/DotOperator

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