Records (was Re: [Haskell] Improvements to GHC)

[David Roundy]

On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 01:40:01PM +0100, Georg Martius wrote:
> 7. Unordered records.
> 	I don' t understand it. 

It's just that I'd like to be able to write:

data FooBar = FooBar { foo, bar :: String }

such that you can't write

let f = FooBar "a" "b"

but instead are forced to write

let f = FooBar { foo = "a", bar = "b" }

More importantly when you pattern match, you couldn't write

case f of FooBar _ b -> b

but instead would have to write

case f of FooBar { bar = b } -> b

The reason being that I'd like to be able to export constructors from a
module in such a way that I can later reorder or add or remove field from
that record without breaking any pattern-matching code, and if I'm only
reordering the fields, I shouldn't break any constructor code either.

As an aside, what's responsible for the insanity of pattern matching record
fields being backwards? I'd bar = b to bind b to bar, not the other way
around... why should record pattern matching use '=' in a manner opposite
from the rest of Haskell?
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net
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