[Haskell-cafe] records proposals list

[Malcolm Wallace]

David Roundy <droundy at abridgegame.org> writes:

> I'd benefit from just a list of problems that the record proposals want to
> solve.
> 
> 1. The field namespace issue.
> 2. Multi-constructor getters, ideally as a function.
> 3. "Safe" getters for multi-constructor data types.
> 4. Getters for multiple data types with a common field.
> 5. Setters as functions.
> 6. Anonymous records.
> 7. Unordered records.

Personally, I would quite like to have "first-class labels".  By this
I mean the ability to pass record labels as arguments, and to return
them as results.

With this one generalisation, it would be possible to cover most of
the wishlist above.  A generic getter and setter could be defined
simply as polymorphic functions e.g.

    get :: Label n -> Record (n::a | r) -> a
    set :: Label n -> a -> Record r -> Record (n::a | r)
    upd :: Label n -> (a->a) -> Record (n::a | r) -> Record (n::a | r)

You could even define your own preferred syntactic sugar for these
operations e.g.

    r . l = get l r

.. and the higher-order uses fall out for free

    map (get foo) listOfRecords

There are several proposals incorporating this idea.

    Oleg Kiselyov and Ralf Lämmel, "Haskell's overlooked object system"
        http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/OOHaskell/

    Daan Leijen, "First-class labels for extensible rows"
        http://www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/pubs.html

    Benedict Gaster and Mark Jones, "A Polymorphic Type System for
    Extensible Records and Variants"
        http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~mpj/pubs/polyrec.html

Regards,
    Malcolm