On 24/02/10 18:23, Ian Lynagh wrote:
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 07:07:30PM -0800, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
I'd like to propose that we add record punning to Haskell 2011.
Thoughts, objections, suggestions?
I have a feeling I'm in the minority, but I find record punning an ugly
feature.
Given
data T = C { f :: Int }
we implicitly get
f :: T -> Int
which punning shadows with
f :: Int
whereas I generally avoid shadowing completely.
While I agree with these points, I was converted to record punning
(actually record wildcards) when I rewrote the GHC IO library. Handle
is a record with 12 or so fields, and there are literally dozens of
functions that start like this:
flushWriteBuffer :: Handle -> IO ()
flushWriteBuffer Handle{..} = do
if I had to write out the field names I use each time, and even worse,
think up names to bind to each of them, it would be hideous.
There are reasons to find this distasteful, yes, but I think the
alternative is much worse.
I'm not proposing record wildcards (yet) *cough* labelled-field
wildcards, but punning is a step in the right direction.
Cheers,
Simon
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