[Haskell-cafe] Some thoughts on Type-Directed Name Resolution

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 4/02/2012, at 12:13 AM, Gábor Lehel wrote:
> 
> All of this said, record.field is still the most readable, intuitive,
> and familiar syntax for selecting a field from a record that I know
> of.

Having learned COBOL and Algol 68 before Haskell was dreamed of,
I regard

	field OF record

as the most readable, intuitive, and familiar syntax.  Given our
background in reading natural language text, most of us probably
thought once upon a time that '.' was the most readable, intuitive,
and familiar syntax for terminating a statement, and in COBOL, NDL,
and Smalltalk, it _is_.  There's certainly nothing about a dot
that suggests field selection, *unless* you happen to be familiar
with a programming language that does it that way.  If we are going
to let compatibility with Pascal or C or the like be our guide to
readability and intuition, when are we going to switch from "!" and
"!!" for indexing to _[_]?