[Haskell-cafe] Status of TypeDirectedNameResolution proposal?

[wren ng thornton]

Neil Brown wrote:
> Having skimmed the page, it seems like the re-use of "." is one of the 
> major difficulties of the proposal.  Would it be possible to use "->"?  
> It has been used for accessing members in C and C++, so it is not too 
> unusual a choice.

It's also the one that Perl went with.


> It is already special in Haskell so it wouldn't break 
> anyone's code -- but do its other uses (case statements and lambdas) 
> mean that it would cause problems in the grammar if re-used for TDNR?

Given the other uses of -> in Haskell, I'm hesitant to suggest it 
either. I seem to recall # is the option used by OCaml and a few other 
functional-OO languages. So far as I know -XMagicHash is the only thing 
that would conflict with that name so it seems far less invasive than . 
or ->. Another option would be to use @ which is currently forbidden in 
expressions, though that might cause issues with System F/Core.

-- 
Live well,
~wren