PROPOSAL: Include record puns in Haskell 2011

Iavor Diatchki iavor.diatchki at gmail.com
Wed Feb 24 13:14:49 EST 2010


Hello,
(Malcolm, sorry for the double post, I forgot to CC the list)
I was thinking mostly about the "old-time"-y punning, where I can
write a label, say "theField", and it automatically gets expanded to
"theField = theField", in record patterns and record constructing
expressions.

The only corner case that I can remember about this is the interaction
with qualified names, the issue being what happens if a label in a pun
is qualified?  I think that in such cases we should just used the
unqualified form for the variable associated with the label.  In
patterns, I can't think of any other sensible alternative.  In
expressions, I could imaging expanding "A.theField" to "A.theField =
A.theField" but it seems that this would almost never be what we want,
while in all the uses I've had "A.theField = theField" is what was
needed.

I think that this is exactly what GHC implements, at least based on
the following example:

module A where data T = C { f :: Int }

{-# LANGUAGE NamedFieldPuns #-}
module B where
import qualified A

testPattern (A.C { A.f }) = f
testExpr f                = A.C { A.f }

I imagine that this is fairly close to what was in Haskell 1.3?   As
far as wild-cards are concerned, I don't feel particularly strongly
about them either way (I can see some benefits and some drawbacks) so
I'd be happy to leave them for a separate proposal or add them to this
one, depending on how the rest of the community feels.

-Iavor





On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 1:35 AM, Malcolm Wallace
<malcolm.wallace at cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
>> I'd like to propose that we add record punning to Haskell 2011.
>
> Can you be more specific?  Do you propose to re-instate punning exactly as
> it was specified in Haskell 1.3?  Or do you propose in addition some of the
> newer extensions that have been recently implemented in ghc (but not other
> compilers), such as record wildcards?
>
> Regards,
>    Malcolm
>
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