Avoiding namespace pollution in Haskell

Question

I\'m using lots of different records in a program, with some of them using the same field names, e.g.

data Customer = Customer { ..., foo :: Int, ... }
data          


        

Answer 1

See also the Has package: http://chrisdone.com/posts/duck-typing-in-haskell

And if you really need extensible records now, you can always use HList. But I wouldn't recommend this until you're really familiar and comfortable with medium-advanced Haskell, and even then I'd triple check you need it.

Haskelldb has a slightly more lightweight version: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/haskelldb/2.1.0/doc/html/Database-HaskellDB-HDBRec.html

And then there's another version of extensible records as part of the grapefruit frp library: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/grapefruit-records

Again, for your purposes, I'd bite the bullet and just rename the fields. But these references are to show that when you really need the full power of extensible records, there are ways to do it, even if none are as pleasant as a well-designed language extension would be.