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:
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.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.
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 :-)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 :-)
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
-- ================================================== | 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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