Recursive records and recursion about nickel HOT 4 CLOSED

As a slight aside, we should consider getting rid of nested records because they make things unnecessarily complicated. For example, with Nixpkgs overlays, it's easy to override a top-level package foo, but good luck figuring out how to override perlPackages.foo.

So the record { a = 1; b.c = 2; } shouldn't be a record containing fields a and b (where b is a record containing c), but a record containing fields a and b.c. This removes ambiguity about what self refers to, e.g. in { a = 1; b.a = 2; b.c = self.a; }, b.c would evaluate to 1, since self refers to the entire record.

Edit: this is more relevant to #84, since it means a.b.c = {e="bar"}; is something different than a.b.c.e = "bar";.

from nickel.

I think my preference would be for something that behaves like the NixOS module system, but without any special syntax like rec or config.<attr> or self. So you could write { a = 1; b = a; }, and the value of b depends on whether this record is later extended with a definition that overrides a.

from nickel.

Is this closed by #135? Sounds like the decision was made there to not require an explicit rec keyword. The rest of this issue appears to be obsolete.

from nickel.

Closed by #135 for records, superseded by #525 for let-binding.

from nickel.