Recently I stumbled once again on the issues of Haskell’s records, in particular the uniqueness of field names. (It’s a pain…)
I already read A proposal for records in Haskell from SPJ and Greg Morrisett, but its last update was in 2003.
Another paper called Lightweight Extensible Records for Haskell from SPJ and Mark Jones is even older: It’s from a Haskell workshop in 1999.
Now I’m wondering if the process of giving Haskell new records made any progress.
Does anybody know something about it or can anybody point me to some further reading?
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My two pennies.
Believe it or not, Haskell is too much used to allow a breaking change with existing software. And it’s difficult to add records withoud breaking an important part of the language.
UPDATE: BTW, I think that records are a good new feature. I like the most, not having members names polluting global namespace.
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A proposal for “record dot syntax” has been accepted for GHC.