[Haskell-cafe] Records (was Re: [Haskell] Improvements to GHC)

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 11/18/05, Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 12:21:09PM +0100, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> > On 11/18/05, Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 06:56:09PM +0100, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> >
> > > > Some people do use it more often than I do, but I find that in most
> > > > cases except simple "pipelined" functions it only makes the code
> > > > harder to read.
> > >
> > > But this case is quite important, isn't it?
> >
> > I'm not so sure it is, and you can almost always write it using ($)
> > without too much trouble. I really only ever use (.) for pretty simple
> > things like filter (not . null).
>
> Try not to look as if you wanted to _remove_ the composition operator,
> because that will make people angry (wrrrr...) :-)
> We are talking about _renaming_ the composition, not removing it,
> right?

Yes. I just don't think it's used enough to warrant giving it one of
the best symbols.

> Anyway, is it realistic to expect that people will rewrite their
> programs to use the new operator? I thought that the new version of
> Haskell will be mostly downwards compatible with Hashell 98?

Well the records proposal is unlikely to go in Haskell 1.5 anyway, so
I'm mainly exercising wishful thinking here. In Haskell 2.0, which I
understand to be more of a "complete make-over, backwards-compability
be damned!", this could be considered.

/S
--
Sebastian Sylvan
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