Records in Haskell

[wren ng thornton]

On 2/24/12 5:40 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:
> I share Greg's concerns about polymorphic projections. For example,
> given a function
>
>      sort :: Ord a =>  ...
>
> we don't allow any 'a' that happens to export a operator that's
> spelled<= to be passed to 'sort'. We have the user explicitly create
> an instance and thereby defining that their<= is e.g. a strict weak
> ordering and thus make sense when used with 'sort'. This explicitness
> is useful, it communicates the contract of the function to the reader
> and lets us catch mistakes in a way that automatically polymorphic
> projections don't.
>
> Automatically polymorphic projections feels like Go's structural
> polymorphism, C++'s templates or C's automatic numeric coercions, and
> I'm worried it'll lead to problems when used at scale. They're not
> required to solve the problem we're trying to solve, so lets hurry
> slowly and don't bake them in together with the namespacing problem.
> At the very least use two different LANGUAGE pragmas so users can have
> one without the other.

+1.

I'm not sure that I like the current proposals for how to control the 
non/automatic-ness of polymorphism (for reasons I can spell out later, 
if desired). But we definitely want to have something that's a bit more 
cultured than simply making all record projectors polymorphic over records.

-- 
Live well,
~wren