[Haskell-cafe] Type Directed Name Resolution

[Luke Palmer]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 1:41 AM, Luke Palmer <lrpalmer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 1:34 AM, John Lask <jvlask at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> On 11/11/2010 5:21 PM, Ketil Malde wrote:
>>>
>>> "Richard O'Keefe"<ok at cs.otago.ac.nz>  writes:
>>>
>>>>> it is often desirable to have the same field names
>>>>> for many records in the same module.
>>>
>>
>> very much so, this is currently possible, with the restriction that
>> the field names must have the same type modulo the record it is selecting
>> on.
>>
>> what is disirable is that this restriction be lifted.
>
> Haskell has a wonderful history of being careful to consider both
> sides of a restriction.  One one hand, a restriction can make it
> harder to write something you want to write.  On the other hand, a
> restriction can provide properties that make it easy to transform and
> reason about your program.
>
> So I am not ready to accept your claim that this is desirable without
> further justification.

Sorry for the self-reply.  I just want to clarify, I didn't mean to
write off your well-thought-out message with this simple comment.  I
was just drawing attention to the duality of restrictions.

Luke