> ... I'm struggling to see why people > are fighting so hard to get the dot character in > particular for field access. It seems like a huge amount > of work and discussion for a tiny bit of syntactic > convenience that we've only come to expect because of > exposure to other very different languages.
Dan/all, I think yous should backtrack to SPJ's SORF and TDNR proposals, and the Yesod/Reddit discussion that triggered the latest 'Records in Haskell' threads. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records SORF: "It is critical to support dot-notation." TDNR: "Exploting the power of the dot" TDNR: "a feature that has a _cultural_ connection to OO, but that turns out to be fully compatible with a functional language." TDNR: "I have deliberately used dot ..." "It's standard practice, and that counts for a lot." "Selecting a field from a record is a particularly convenient special case, ..." "... is doing the same job as Haskell's existing qualified names, ..." I guess the 'clincher' for me is that if we're going to ask SPJ to implement anything (and there's no-one else who's capable) we'd better have very powerful reasons to go against his so clearly expressed views. Remember GHC/Haskell Prime is not run as a democracy, it's a benevolent meritocracy. We've probaly only got one shot: if we don't include dot notation with whatever happens for 'Records in Haskell', we'll probably never get dot notation. SPJ has made it clear Records is not a priority. If it contues to be an area for hot dispute, it'll just die a death (again). I do, however, agree with you questioning the effort going into surface syntax vs. deep semantics. (The relative effort is confirming Wadler's rule.) Because what's not getting enough 'airtime' is how we address even the "narrow issue: namespacing for record field names." What we are tending to get (apart from the hatchet-job on the dot) is another bundle of half-baked suggestions for the impossibily difficult "broad issue: first class record types". I'm working towards a proposal for the narrow issue. I'm trying to make the changes to Haskell as minimal as possible. So far, I've built a prototype in GHC v 7.2.1 (with many record-oriented extensions), which gives me hope I'm mostly asking for syntactic sugar. It's been somewhat helpful with the design to 'test the water' through the discussion lists. It's also been distracting. I've only had one response that was really, really helpful and on-topic -- and that was from SPJ, who (heck knows) is a very busy person. I don't want the response to my proposal (if/when I get time to write it up convincingly) to focus on the dot. Luckily, under my design, the dot is very much syntactic sugar. (So actually, it would be absurdly simple to implement, and even simpler to leave out. That is, simple compared to implementing the semantics.) I don't need it. I'm in two minds whether even to mention it. AntC _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
