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

[Tom Pledger]

Conor McBride wrote:
[...]

>There's a catch, of course. When you write
>
>  r <| e
>
>you give the typechecker no clue as to the type of r: it just
>has to infer the type of r and hope it's a datatype. 
>

This is reminiscent of an issue I encountered a year or so ago, when 
designing a language. The main example  I used was a function for 
calculating the magnitude of a two dimensional vector. It would be nice 
to simplify this

    magnitude v = sqrt ((v <| x)*(v <| x) + (v <| y)*(v <| y))

to this

    magnitude v = v <| sqrt (x*x + y*y)

but how was the compiler to know that x and y are fields of v, but sqrt 
and (+) and (*) aren't?

What I ended up doing was making a rule that if the record expression 
(the part to the left of the <|) could not be statically tracked to 
something which revealed the field names, then the right hand side (of 
the <|) must contain exactly one free variable. This static tracking 
took place before type inference, so it was in line with Simon PJ's 
preference for keeping scope and type inference separate.

I also used some syntactic sugar for explicit record narrowing, so the 
final version of the magnitude function was

    magnitude v = v(.x, .y) <| sqrt (x*x + y*y)

which was quite similar to Cayenne's "open ... use ... in ..." feature.

Regards,
Tom Pledger