The Future of Haskell discussion at the Haskell Workshop

[Iavor Diatchki]

hello,

i think records are very useful, and we don't use them much in haskell, 
becuase the current record system is not very good.

Adrian Hey wrote:
> IMHO preserving the status quo wrt records should be low priority.
> It really doesn't bother me much if new (useful) language features break
> existing code. I think this is a better option than permanently
> impoverishing the language and/or forcing users to migrate their
> entire code to some other less impoverished language which may
> appear in the future.
i also think that having backwards compatability is not much of an 
issue.  after all, ghc has introduces a  number of not backward 
compatable changes to haskell, and i never heard any complaints.  i am 
referring to the hirarchical modules, and more recently template 
haskell, which has introduced a number of syntactic differences, and we 
had to actually go through our code and fix it to work with ghc 6.

> What I don't particularly want to see is some "half baked" record system,
> the usefulness of which has been compromised by the need to retain
> backwards compatibility. I quite liked what I saw of the "First Class
> Modules" paper. Is there some reason why we can't have (shouldn't have?) that.
> (Apart from the additional workload it places on Haskell implementors :-)
there has been a lot of work on record systems, so there really is no 
excuse for having a half-baked recrod system.  the trex implementation 
in hugs tried to retain backward compatability with haskell, which 
resulted in a rather ugly syntax (this of course is just my opinion :-)

my preference would be to have something simillar to trex but with a 
nicer syntax, i.e. extensible records that do not need to be declared.

incidently i gathered that people wanted reocrds that support record 
concatenation, does anyone have any examples of what that might be used for?

bye
iavor


-- 
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| Iavor S. Diatchki, Ph.D. student               |
| Department of Computer Science and Engineering |
| School of OGI at OHSU                          |
| http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~diatchki               |
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