Record selectors

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

Hi Daniel,

Without pretending that I hold the answer to the problem, I think you are a
little bit too harsh.

If I am not too wrong, implementing a "regular" type system with
user-defined types for a dynamically-typed functional language will add in
one way or another to the complexity of the syntax. I simply can't come up
with an existing language where this is solved elegantly (i.e. without
contriving the language) while keeping a reasonable amount of efficiency -
if anyone has any examples, please let me know.

I think the already expressed opinions about using for example dictionaries
instead of today's records are closer to the soul of Erlang. If one would
come up with a nice piece of syntactic sugar that would make the
implementation transparent to the user, and also allow switching it easily
between debug and release builds in order to trade type-safety for speed,
then that would be very welcomed.

best regards,
Vlad