[thoughtpolice]

To be completely honest, the namespace/module situation with Haskell could certainly be a _ton_ better, but after 8 years of it I can't ever remember a time when it was ever at the top of my mind as game-breaking. Occasionally quite annoying? Yes, most definitely. But I'd say there are more many more annoying things day to day, and in any case, it is certainly a tradeoff I'll put up with for the returns.

That said, GHC 7.10 will ship with a new extension called `OverloadedRecordFields` that will allow you to have identical record field names for different datatypes. Yay!

[msie]

Thanks! If it's not a pain in regular Haskell work then I'm relieved. Perhaps other data types are more prevalent in Haskell than records?

[dllthomas]

I agree with the parent that it is a pain, but not very much of one. My pains in lacking other features when I move away from Haskell are far greater than my pains in name collision in Haskell.

[imanaccount]

I find records are used most heavily in web development, where you are pretty much just shuffling data from browsers to databases and the other way around. But even there the field name thing doesn't pose much of a problem, I prefer defining my records in the module that handles the functions for it, so there's no issue with conflicting names anyways. I found the fact that 'id' is a standard library function to be a bigger minor annoyance.