Are Records stalled out again? I am perfectly willing to leave the fate of records up to a willing and capable implementer. That seems much better than waiting another 5 years for perfection :)<div><br><div>As an intermediate step, is it possible to put a warning in 7.4 when the dot operator is used without a space so that it can be reserved for usage with a records solution? Or will the new records solution be turned on by an extension anyways?<br>
<div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:simonpj@microsoft.com">simonpj@microsoft.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im">| would inclusion of such a record system into GHC mean that plans for<br>
| first-class labels (<<a href="http://tinyurl.com/7fppj32" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/7fppj32</a>>) are abandoned? That<br>
| would be a pity, since first-class labels are very useful to implement<br>
| record systems that go beyond what the abovementioned record system<br>
| provides. See, for example, my work on records:<br>
| <<a href="http://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~jeltsch/research/ppdp-2010-paper.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~jeltsch/research/ppdp-2010-paper.pdf</a>><br>
| <<a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/package/records" target="_blank">http://hackage.haskell.org/package/records</a>><br>
<br>
</div>The story is summarised at<br>
<a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records" target="_blank">http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records</a><br>
<br>
First-class labels are one point in the vast swamp of competing and overlapping proposals for records. I think they are summarise here:<br>
<a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ExtensibleRecords" target="_blank">http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ExtensibleRecords</a><br>
I am unsure which of this list of proposals you are referring to. The URL you quote is this<br>
<a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/FirstClassLabels" target="_blank">http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/FirstClassLabels</a><br>
but it doesn't seem to actually contain a design, merely some options for a design that is implicit. If you do have a design you advocate, it would be good to add it to the list at<br>
<a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ExtensibleRecords" target="_blank">http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ExtensibleRecords</a><br>
perhaps explaining which of the other members of the list it subsumes.<br>
<br>
Because there are so many proposals I have not gone ahead with any of them. The most recent thread, articulated at<br>
<a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records" target="_blank">http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records</a><br>
is to ask what is the *smallest change* that would solve the *most pressing problem*, namely the inability to use the same field name in different records. First class labels is (I assume) much more ambitious. But maybe not.<br>
<br>
Anything you can do to bring clarity to the swamp, by editing the above two pages, would be a great service to the community. At the moment, we are stuck in an infinite loop.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Simon<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></div>