On 28/01/2012 13:00, Paul R wrote:
AntC> Steve, I think that proposal has been rather superseeded by
AntC> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Records/OverloadedRecordFields,
which
AntC> draws on TDNR. But SORF is best seen as an evolving design space, with
precise
AntC> details yet to be clarified/agreed. I've put my own variation into the
ring:
AntC> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2011-
AntC> December/021298.html -- which seems to have fallen into a black hole
:-(
AntC> One of the aspects of TDNR that wasn't so popular was that its
type-directed
AntC> resolution was very similar to instance resolution, but subtly and
confusingly
AntC> different.
AntC> I guess we have to be very careful about the dot. It seems to be in a
AntC> very 'crowded' syntax space, so if we implement the wrong way, we could
end up
AntC> shutting the door with the keys left inside.
AntC> (...)
All this dot syntax magic frankly frightens me. Haskell, as a pure
functionnal language, requires (and allows !) a programming style that
just does not mix well with object oriented practices. Stretching the
syntax to have the dot feel a-bit-but-not-really like object oriented
programming, mainly to have IDE autocompletion on some cases, does not
make much sens.
That's a benefit of my idea. Modular programming used the dot long
before OOP became popular - OOP stole the dot from modular programming!
If a record is a module, that only means that one thing can be both a
module and a type (or value) at the same time. It takes little from OOP
that OOP didn't already take from the more fundamental modular
programming - and Haskell already has modules.
If the editor matters - and it probably does -, we could rather take
a more ambitious path, and work on a real semantic editor, as opposed to
a plain left-to-right text editor, with hacked semantic goodies to
alleviate the pain.
Every programmer has their own favorite editor, usually using the same
one to work in many different languages. For the moment, you'd have a
hard job separating me from Notepad++.
If you really want a "semantic editor", I'd argue a rich visual language
with a file format that isn't intended to be read directly. Something
more like writing in Word than writing in TeX. But I don't think most
programmers are ready for this, for various reasons. Version control
tools and readable differences get a place near the top of that list.
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