[ghc-steering-committee] Modifiers (Was: #512: NoFieldSelectors as datatype annotation)

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Hmm.

   - We have an accepted proposal for modifiers.
   - As of today we have a willing implementer, Georgi:
   https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/22624

And yet some doubt is being expressed in this thread about whether the
accepted proposal is the one we really want.

@rae Georgi says you are going to mentor him.  Do you feel able to help us
converge on a design we are all content with; quite possibly just
reaffirming the current accepted proposal?

Simon



On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 at 09:43, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de>
wrote:

> Hi Richard,
>
> thanks, comparing Modifiers to the annotations and attributes in other
> languages indeed puts this into a perspective that makes more sense to
> me. It seems I have assumed a broader scope for modifiers (maybe
> because “modify” sounds much stronger than “annotate” or
> “attribut…ize”). So I conclude the goal is not to necessarily to remove
> _all_ kind of  pragmas, but only maybe those that fit the pattern (e.g.
> don’t affect parsing and renaming). Is that right?
>
> So my straw man “could qualified imports be modifiers” is simply out of
> scope (heh).
>
> Especially the potential use case for plugins (which do benefit from an
> extensible, namespaced scheme that does not require changes to parsing)
> – essentially a variant of the ANN pragma – is convincing.
>
> Turning back to NoFieldSelectors, however, I notice that
> NoFieldSelectors _does_ affect renaming already, because it affects
> whether a symbol with the field’s name is in scope (which, in
> particular, has further effects with implicit binders etc…), doesn't
> it? So would modifiers, if we had them, even work here?
>
>
> Cheers,
> Joachim
> --
> Joachim Breitner
>   mail at joachim-breitner.de
>   http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
>
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