--- /dev/null
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
+<!DOCTYPE pkgmetadata SYSTEM "http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/metadata.dtd">
+<pkgmetadata>
+ <maintainer type="project">
+ <email>haskell@gentoo.org</email>
+ <name>Gentoo Haskell</name>
+ </maintainer>
+ <longdescription>
+ In Haskell 98 the name of a record field
+ is automatically also the name of a function which gets the value
+ of the according field.
+ E.g. if we have
+
+ data Pair a b = Pair
+ first :: a, second :: b
+
+ then
+
+ > first :: Pair a b -> a
+ > second :: Pair a b -> b
+
+ However for setting or modifying a field value
+ we need to use some syntactic sugar, which is often clumsy.
+
+ modifyFirst :: (a -> a) -> (Pair a b -> Pair a b)
+ modifyFirst f r\@(Pair
+ first=a
+ ) = r
+ first = f a
+
+ With this package you can define record field accessors
+ which allow setting, getting and modifying values easily.
+ The package clearly demonstrates the power of the functional approach:
+ You can combine accessors of a record and sub-records,
+ to make the access look like the fields of the sub-record belong to the main record.
+
+ Example:
+
+ > *Data.Accessor.Example> (first^:second^=10) (('b',7),"hallo")
+ > (('b',10),"hallo")
+
+ You can easily manipulate record fields in a 'Control.Monad.State.State' monad,
+ you can easily code 'Show' instances that use the Accessor syntax
+ and you can parse binary streams into records.
+ See @Data.Accessor.Example@ for demonstration of all features.
+
+ It would be great if in revised Haskell versions the names of record fields
+ are automatically 'Data.Accessor.Accessor's
+ rather than plain @get@ functions.
+ For now, the package @data-accessor-template@ provides Template Haskell functions
+ for automated generation of 'Data.Acesssor.Accessor's.
+ See also the other @data-accessor@ packages
+ that provide an Accessor interface to other data types.
+ The package @enumset@ provides accessors to bit-packed records.
+
+ For similar packages see @lenses@ and @fclabel@.
+ A related concept are editors
+ <http://conal.net/blog/posts/semantic-editor-combinators/>.
+ Editors only consist of a modify method
+ (and @modify@ applied to a 'const' function is a @set@ function).
+ This way, they can modify all function values of a function at once,
+ whereas an accessor can only change a single function value,
+ say, it can change @f 0 = 1@ to @f 0 = 2@.
+ This way, editors can even change the type of a record or a function.
+ An Arrow instance can be defined for editors,
+ but for accessors only a Category instance is possible ('(.)' method).
+ The reason is the @arr@ method of the @Arrow@ class,
+ that conflicts with the two-way nature (set and get) of accessors.
+ </longdescription>
+</pkgmetadata>