Keep the present Haskell record system!

[Benjamin Franksen]

On Saturday 04 March 2006 19:35, Claus Reinke wrote:
> a more promising approach would be to specify the user-level features
> of the current system, then to show at least two translations: one
> for the current desugaring, and a second one to demonstrate at least
> one implementation of those features in an alternative record system.
>
> the point of that exercise would be to figure out which features of
> the current user-level view of labelled fields would make a later
> transition difficult, and to mark them as deprecated or to remove
> them now. in other words, the "reference" translation should not be
> to the most powerful record system imagined so far, but to a fairly
> simple one, which all "better" record systems ought to be able to
> mimic.
>
> my current favourite for such a simple alternative record system
> would be Daan Leijen's "Extensible records with scoped labels"
> (TFP2005): http://www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/pubs.html

Yes. Daan Leijen's record system is the best of all the ones I have read 
about, not least because of its simplicity.

> ps. the Curry folks are looking into adding labelled fields,
>     and seem to have decided to go for a trial implementation
>     of Daan's system before making any decisions:
> http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~curry/listarchive/0406.html

I would very much like to have this. I wouldn't mind if it were 
qualified as an experimental extension, etc.. If not in Haskell' then 
maybe at least in some future ghc version?

Ben