<html><head><base href="x-msg://8/"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Dec 31, 2011, at 1:28 PM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><div lang="EN-GB" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div class="WordSection1" style="page: WordSection1; "><div style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: blue; border-left-width: 1.5pt; padding-top: 0cm; padding-right: 0cm; padding-bottom: 0cm; padding-left: 4pt; position: static; z-index: auto; "><div><div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-bottom: 12pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; ">The trouble is that I just don't have the bandwidth (or, if I'm honest, the motivation) to drive this through to a conclusion. And if no one else does either, perhaps it isn't *that* important to anyone. That said, it clearly is *somewhat* important to a lot of people, so doing nothing isn't very satisfactory either.<br><br>Usually I feel I know how to move forward, but here I don't.<br><span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136); "><br>Simon<br></span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></span></blockquote></div><div>It seems to me that there's only one essential missing language feature, which is appropriately-kinded type-level strings (and, ideally, the ability to reflect these strings back down to the value level). Given that, template haskell, and the HList bag of tricks, I'm confident that a fair number of elegant records packages can be crafted. Based on that experience, we can then decide what syntactic sugar would be useful to elide the TH layer altogether.</div><div><br></div><div>Beyond that, it would really help namespacing in general to appropriately extend the module system to allow multiple modules to be declared within a single file -- or, better yet, "submodules". I know that this introduces a few corner cases that need to be thought through -- what happens with overlapping declarations, for example. But I tend to think the path here is relatively straightforward and obvious, and the added expressive power should make namespacing issues much more tractable. Like the type-level strings proposal, this isn't about implementing records as such -- rather, it's about generally extending the expressive power of the language so that record systems--among other things--are easier to write.</div><div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Gershom</div></body></html>