<div dir="ltr">On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 04:37, Malcolm Wallace <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:malcolm.wallace@me.com">malcolm.wallace@me.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I agree with John. There is no point in fiddling with the dots, until we have real experience with a new records proposal (which can be implemented entirely without using dot, at least initially).<br></blockquote><div><br>
</div><div><br></div><div>I would claim this should have been done back when hierarchical modules were added.</div><div><br></div><div>More generally, it seems to me the Haskell spec has a number of places where potentially colliding syntactic elements are expected to be disambiguated by the compiler, with effects ranging from restricting future syntactic modifications (such as with the present arguments over (.)) to the now-removed impossible brace insertion semantics of Haskell98. Cutting things close syntactically just because you can is perhaps not the best of ideas; in this case, we'd be adding spaces both syntactically and metaphorically (in terms of "expansion space" in the spec), which I suspect is a good idea in general.</div>
<div><br></div><div>(To provide an example not related to the records discussion, every so often the question comes up of providing proper support for character sets which don't have an upper/lowercase distinction, where currently you can't declare types --- or, less often noted, use module names from those csets. Fixing this is likely to complicate parsing periods even more than record.field syntax would.)</div>
<div><br></div></div>-- <br>brandon s allbery <a href="mailto:allbery.b@gmail.com" target="_blank">allbery.b@gmail.com</a><br>wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms<br>
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