Everyone wants to add extensible records to Haskell. The problem is
that, in a formally defined language like Haskell, we need to agree
how they should behave, and there are too many conflicting ideas.
I was involved recently in an attempt to try to sort out some of the
alternatives (recorded here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ExtensibleRecords)
which collapsed because of argument over a fundamental question:
Should {label := "Hi", color := blue} and {color := blue, label :=
"Hi"} have the same type?
One of the main contributors felt that the answer was no (because it
allows more different records to be represented, and makes
implementation simpler), and that we should say so. I felt that most
people would consider that the answer was yes, and that we shouldn't
make such a fundamental design decision without some evidence about
what is best in practice.
The result was that our attempt to sort things out stopped.
This sort of disagreement means that nothing gets done. After my
experience with the wiki page, I don't believe anything will get done
until one of the core ghc developers makes some arbitrary decisions
and implements whatever they want to, which will then eventually
become part of the standard by default.
Barney.
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