HaskellDB

[Tom Pledger]

Simon Peyton-Jones writes:
 | Funnily enough, I'm currently ruminating on the possibility of adding
 | extensible records to GHC.  My current thought is: much like TRex,
 | except with 'has' predicates instead of 'lacks' predicates.  That would
 | give
 | 	polymorphic field selection and update
 | 	but not polymorphic record extension
 :
 | Question: does anyone really care about polymorphic extension.

Yes!  But my reasons are of dubious merit, so I'd better come clean
and state them.

  - When handling records which have come out of a database (or EDI
    file or suchlike), with the results needing to go into a database
    too, I find I tend to copy some fields directly into the result
    record, from fields of the same name in other records.  (COBOL,
    anyone?  move by name rec1 to rec2.)

  - Some time in the future (Haskell 2?), I'd like to see convergence
    between Haskell's module system and records.  Records with
    polymorphic extension would be a step in that direction: they'd
    support reexporting as in:

        module A(f, g, module B) where
        import B
        ...

Have you considered asymmetric merge, as an alternative to Trex-style
extension?  For example, this function

    f x = x { l <- (3::Int) }

would have this type

    f :: (r has l::Int) => r -> r