[ghc-steering-committee] Records again

[Joachim Breitner]

[continuation, hit sent too soon, sorry]

Oh, and here is a nice way to justify the JS variant in a very
functionally motivated way. Not sure if it is helpful, though, but it
certainly is a cute angle…

A record r with fields foo and bar can be thought of as a _function_
with domain {.foo, .bar} (and a dependent return type, but we are
talking syntax, not types).

With that point of view, the syntax 

   r .foo

_is_ simply function application. And we do not need _any_ custom
mental parsing rules at all, and get

  f r.field y    = ((f r).field) y
  f r .field y   = ((f r).field) y

and now of course you write

  f (r.x)

or

  f (r .x)

just like you would write

  f (g x)




Cheers,
Joachim
-- 
Joachim Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de
  http://www.joachim-breitner.de/