[Haskell-cafe] Not too extensible records?

[Olaf Klinke]

> I have a situation that I think is a good case to apply extensible records to. I
> have two kinds of entities that are both extensible but in different ways — I
> would like to make sure their fields are not mixed. At the same time, I want to
> be able to extend the sets of fields across several modules. Is it possible and
> is it practical?
> My case is that I have a type for graphs that is a bifunctor — in node labels
> and edge labels.
> So, I need to be able to add more and more fields to labels, but in such a way
> that it is impossible to assign an unsuitable field.

If your graph is already a bifunctor, why not use a disctinct label or
node type in each use case/module? That certainly fits the requirement
of not mixing fields. Then you could go the old-fashioned way of type
classes, e.g.
class HasTopology label where
   topology :: label -> Topology
instance HasTopology Topology where
   topology = id
instance HasTopology label => HasTopology (label,moreInfo) where
   topology = topology.fst

Or for updateable fields, use a Lens Topology. 
This is a lot of boilerplate, I admit, but you have fine-grained
control over what your types have in common. Nested pairs are type-
level polymorphic lists and with the right type classes can be used as
such, if the list of types is known at compile-time. It is similar to
what mtl does with the MonadFoo classes. 

Olaf