thoughts on the record update problem

[Chris Smith]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info> wrote:
> This discussion has largely centered around trying to come up with a
> hack that desugars to Haskell's existing language constructs.

> There is an alternative to a desugaring hack: add a real record
> construct to the language.

I am not sure what distinction you are making between "real record
construct" and "desugaring hack".  As far as I can see, all major
proposals currently desugar to type classes... not as a "hack" but
because type classes *are* how Haskell does type-directed resolution.
I don't think there are any ground rules set against proposing a
system that doesn't use type classes.  If you wanted, you could
certainly propose a system that defines brand new and potentially very
different semantics for a desired record system from scratch, and has
nothing to do with type classes.  I tend to think it would be a poor
idea, both because it would be a large amount of work to be sure the
semantics are even nailed down well, and because then the progress of
abstraction over that new construct would happen independently from
the existing progress of abstraction over type classes, and we'd end
up with a more complex and warty language as a result.

In any case, I'm in agreement that "stop arguing about semantics and
just implement something" is a very bad idea.  We aren't arguing about
implementation choices here; we're arguing about pretty fundamental
questions of semantics of records and labels, and the way to settle
fundamental questions about the record system we hope to be using in
10 years time is not based on who has time after work for GHC hacking
this month.

-- 
Chris Smith