Records in Haskell

[Chris Smith]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 5:57 PM, Matthew Farkas-Dyck
<strake888 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another thought:
> Perhaps bang as record selection operator. It would avoid further
> corner cases of dot, and it's not unprecedented in Haskell (e.g.
> Data.Map.!).

We already have weird syntax rules for dot, and the proposed change
(i.e., dot is an identifier when surrounded with spaces, else it's
reserved syntax) actually makes the rules *simpler* in some ways
rather than more complex... so why wouldn't we do it that way?

The more difficult bit isn't about quirks of syntax, but rather about
some significant semantic issues and differing design goals.... should
we have a built-in notion of lenses... if so, which formulation...
what kinds of punning do we want to preserve, and how deeply should
punning go in the semantics, versus be a shallow kind of sugar... how
does that interact with the type system... and so on.  These are the
significant problems.