state of Standard

[Serge D. Mechveliani]

Dear Haskellers,

Could you, please, tell me what is the recent state of the 
Haskell Standard development?

I have a wish for the Standard Library:   FiniteMap, Set
(of GHC library).

And I have a question on the  function name  overloading,
and on the  record field name  overloading.

A language should support a natural naming of objects.
For example:

  data Operator = 
       Operator{opName        :: String,
                opWeight      :: Int,
                opSortage     :: ([String],[String],String),
                opOrd         :: Int,
                opPrecedences :: (Int, Int)
               } 

is not good -- due to `op' prefix.
And many other data also have  name, weight, ord,  and so on.
So, one may try to introduce

  class WithName a   where  name       :: a -> String
                            set_name   :: a -> String -> a
  class WithWeight a where  weight     :: a -> Int
                            set_weight :: a -> Int -> a
  ...
  trivialOperator = Operator{ ... some trivial setting ...} 
,

to change the names like  opName  to  opName__, opWeight__, ...
to show that the latter are local and not for usage,
to introduce

  instance WithName Operator where name = opName__
  ...
,
and then, use all this, for example, as follows:
        let
            nm   = name opr
            opr' = set_name "foo" $ 
                   set_weight 1   $ 
                   set_ord 2      $ opr 
        in  ...

This leads to following complications.

* Class declarations add.

* The Standard does not allow to define the instances like

   type BN = (String, Bool)
   instance WithName BN where name = fst

* There are many operations that should be synonymic but have
  different kind. For example,
                               weight :: a -> Int
                               weight :: Table -> a -> Int

  This leads to adventures with multiple parameter classes, 
  and so on.

Similar difficulties arise with the  function  names.

Is Haskell all right at this point?

Reply, please, to    mechvel@botik.ru

Thank you in advance for the explanation.


-----------------
Serge Mechveliani
mechvel@botik.ru