Sorry if people are really bored with this thread, but I thought of
another advantage of this approach.
Trex (and similar systems) have a limitation that stops you using
them to define functions with default values. In systems like R (the
stats package) most functions have a huge number of named parameters
which usually take default values, but can be changed if necessary.
In order to define such functions, what you want is an operation
'update r s' which takes the value of the record 's' (the non-default
values) for each field which 's' has, and the value of 'r' (the
default values) for all other fields. The type of 's' should be such
that it can only have fields which 'r' has, and each such field must
have the same type, but it doesn't need all the fields of 'r'. The
type of the result is the same as the type of 'r'.
This can't be typed in Hugs because you can only update particular
fields, but we can easily add it to (at least the quadratic version
of) AT-records.
Introduce a class 'subRecord r s' which means that every field of 's'
is a field of 'r' with the same type:
>class subRecord r s where
>update :: r -> s -> r
The type 'Empty' is a subRecord of everything, and updating by it
changes nothing:
>instance subRecord r Empty where
>update t Empty = t
For each label 'N' define:
>instance subRecord r s => subRecord (N a r) (N a s) where
>update (N x t) (N y u) = N y (update t u)
For each previous label 'M' define:
>instance subRecord r (M b s) => subRecord (N a r) (M b s) where
>update (N x t) (M y u) = N x (update t (M y u))
There are probably other useful additions to the records system which
could be coded up in a similar way. In fact, the class 'Disjoint' of
my original proposal already goes beyond hugs. Until it is clear what
is useful and what is not, a system like this which requires little
compiler support has the great advantage that it is easy to change.
Barney.
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