[ghc-proposals] Allow reserved identifiers as fields ...
Anthony Clayden <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe |
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And Merry Christmas to all. I counsel against allowing reserved ids to be anything other than reserved ids. "... is fraught with peril, unduly complicates the parser, and harms readability. " says a language implementer I asked. But wanting to use field names dictated outside this language's control is a realistic requirement, for which there are several general approaches. The ghc proposal as it stands seems ad-hoc and very specific to one user organisation. Furthermore, this just ain't true: > ... SQL schemas. anyone working with those is stuck deciding between special-casing its naming, and consistently naming *everything* weirdly, ... SQL consistently supports things like embedded spaces, fields starting upper-case [**], embedded dots or other graphics -- by no means just names that clash with reserved ids. How does it do that? And this answer seems particularly relevant when these ids are going to feed into `HasField` constraints as a type-level String: put the id between quotes. > orgNotification."type" doesn't look too ugly to my eye. And to spj's repeated point: I could envisage allowing fields in `data` decls and record syntax to be quoted. (Again you couldn't use punning nor field-name as function.) The approach is sufficiently general it could be extended to `#"Label naming"`. [**] I'm particularly keen on field names starting upper case, because they're injective/part of the structure, like data constructors. AntC (Why am I posting to the cafe, not github? I seem to be blocked from posting on any topic, either on github or gitlab -- even for pages where I'm the sole author. I'd be grateful if somebody could post the above to the PR.) _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.