[Haskell-cafe] Records

[Keean Schupke]

Just my 2p worth... If I were designing a language I would not have used 
the '.' like Haskell does. One problem is that ascii does not support 
enough symbols (Hmm, PL1 here we come). I guess my vote would go to 
keeping the '.' as is to not break existing programs, and using a 
different symbol for record access and qualified names... however '.' 
works well for DNS names:

    a at f -- function composition (people are used to reading the @ 
backwards due to emails)
    M.f -- qualified naming...
    f?f -- record access...

really needs more symbols... of course the problem then becomes entering 
them on a "normal" keyboard.

    Keean.

Ketil Malde wrote:

>Cale Gibbard <cgibbard at gmail.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>This really isn't so bad in practice though. I've certainly never been
>>confused by it. 
>>    
>>
>
>Well, what can I say?  Good for you?
>
>  
>
>>You'd have to go out of your way to construct a
>>situation in which it's potentially confusing
>>    
>>
>
>No.
>
>  
>
>>There are much more important issues to deal with than this, really.
>>    
>>
>
>Like inventing as many new and wonderful symbolic operators as
>possible!  Hey, why not allow quoted function names?  So that I can
>defined a function "f " different from "f  "?  Or differentiate
>(+4) from completely different  (+ 4), ( +4) and ( + 4) which
>*obviously* are entirely differen things?
>
>  
>
>>might be relevant in the IOHCC, but not in ordinary programming.
>>    
>>
>
>So why not go for the Obfuscated Language Design Contest instead?
>
>  
>
>>In a sane language, small amounts of whitespace sensitivity are going
>>to be around no matter what you do.
>>    
>>
>
>And if you already are using whitespace to separate words, surely the
>logical (not to mention aesthetical) way forward would be to introduce
>evene more whitespace sensitivity - here is the Holy Grail
>  http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/index.php 
>
>I don't understand why this isn't obvious to people who generally
>appear fairly bright, but: introducing extension that turns working
>programs into non-working ones is generally a bad idea.  Having it be
>due to spacing habits around symbolic operators is worse.  That
>spacing changes suddenly starts bringing very complex language
>extensions into the picture, with an associated heap of
>incomprehensible error messages is *not* a nice thing for anybody -
>except, perhaps, the two academics who wrote the paper, and the three
>academics who read it.
>
>--------------------
>
></rant>
>
>Okay, I'm being unfair here.  Haskell is an academic language, its
>primary purpose is to produce papers, not software.  And as a mere
>programmer, I'm in a minority.  I think Haskell is really cool, but I
>don't really belong here, and I realize of course that my voice isn't
>going to carry a lot of weight.
>
>But IF there is a desire for Haskell to be used for Real Work, I think
>there should be a certain degree of stability.  Taking the function
>composition operator and turning it into record selection -- depending
>on spacing, of course -- is, IMO, madness.
>
>But good luck on those papers, and see you later, probably on the
>Clean mailing lists. 
>
>-k
>  
>