[Haskell] Per-type function namespaces (was: Data.Set whishes)

[Ross Paterson]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 09:21:23AM -0000, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> My personal view is this: we should have adopted the ML view of records.
> It solves the immediate problem, and no more elaborate scheme seems
> sufficiently "right" to be declared the winner.    Alas, like all other
> proposals, it's not backward compatible, and hence not likely to fly.

About a year ago, you were toying with a simple polymorphic system with
just "has" predicates.  If these were automatically derived, it seems
you'd get something quite close to backward compatible, except for the
pesky extra lifting in record types, and not being able to omit fields
when constructing the record.  (And update might not statically check
that all fields belong to the same constructor, for the simple version
of the type system.)  Is that just too clunky?