Avoiding namespace pollution in Haskell

This is a very hairy problem. There are several proposals for fixing the record system. On a related note, see TDNR and related discussion on cafe.

Using the currently available language features, I think the best option is defining the two types in two different modules, and doing a qualified import. On top of this, if you want, you can implement some type class machinery.

In Customer.hs

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

In Product.hs

module Product where
data Product = Product { ..., foo :: Int, ... }

While using them, in Third.hs

module Third where

import qualified Customer as C
import qualified Product as P

.. C.foo ..
.. P.foo ..

Yet, I imagine it won’t be too late before you hit the problem about recursively dependent modules.

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